


From Right Here the View Goes On Forever

by ladygrey3



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: The Long Halloween
Genre: Dissociative Identity Disorder, F/M, Happy Ending, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Multi, Poisoning, Polyamory, The Triad Fic, and ivy is also there, bruce and gilda and harvey all fall in love, combined canons from Long Halloween and the animated series with a big dose of pure invention, happy marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-18 07:50:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18116468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygrey3/pseuds/ladygrey3
Summary: “I like Bruce,” Gilda says.





	1. Chapter 1

“I like Bruce,” Gilda says.   
They’re in her studio, or the closet at the back of the house that she has decided is her studio. There’s barely enough room to turn around, but she says the light’s good, and there’s tile on the floor. She’s making a mock-up for a future piece. Her hands are clothed in slick grey clay.   
Harvey, who is sitting in a folding chair and reading a case brief, looks up. “Bruce Wayne?”  
“Do we know another Bruce?” Gilda bites her lip, peering at the blurred, half-finished face under her hands.   
“I mean, I don’t. You might.” Harvey stretches his legs out in front of him. There’s a hole in the toe of his sock. He needs to fix that. “Bruce is decent.”  
“Decent.” Gilda smirks. “I suppose so, if you like the brilliant, gorgeous, philanthropist type.”  
Harvey grins back at her. “Should I be jealous?”  
“Oh, absolutely. If he so much as blinked in my direction, I’d leave you in a second.” Gilda is smiling in earnest now too, only half-focused on the sculpture.   
“You’re a bit ahead of yourself, aren’t you? What makes you think you’re the one he’d ask?”  
Gilda puts the back of her hand to her forehead, leaving a gritty smear of clay behind. “I knew it. Bruce Wayne seduced my husband. I should sell my story to the Post. How could you?”  
“Oh, you know how it is. He bats those pretty eyes, buys you dinner, gets you drunk on fancy wine. Before you know it, you’re breaking ground on a new hospital.”  
“He does have very pretty eyes,” Gilda agrees equanimably.   
“I know. It’s unfair.” Harvey scowls at the sock.   
“Don’t sulk. Your eyes are fine too.”  
“I like to think so. They’ve always served me well.”  
They’re both quiet for a moment. Outside it’s starting to rain. Harvey can hear the quiet murmur of raindrops on the vinyl siding. He likes rain, always has. It makes the world seem softer. Between heartbeats, he has one of the moments that sometimes come upon him these days, where he is stunned and shaken by how lucky he is to be here in this good life. This little room, the smell of clay, Gilda, the rain outside. How could anyone want more? He never once imagined that it was possible to live like this.  
It’s a good feeling, and a scary feeling. Beneath the sweet sharp joy, there is always that raspy little voice. The voice that says, this can’t last. You’ll ruin it. You always do.   
“We should ask him over for dinner,” Gilda says.   
“No point,” Harvey replies.   
“Why not?”  
“Because he’s Bruce Wayne, and as proud as I am of our collective cooking skills, he can get anything we can make at ten times the quality whenever he wants. No point.”   
“Maybe,” Gilda says steadily. “But we’re his friends, and it’s good to make food for your friends sometimes. Whether it’s good food or not.”  
Harvey stirs. “Is it,” he says.   
“Yeah.” Gilda flicks a bit of clay off of the newly emerging left eye of her bust. “It is.”  
Gilda reminds him of a child sometimes. Her big warm brown eyes, the way that she believes things so firmly, as if they are objects you can touch. She believes in capital letters, both in the big stuff like Truth and Love and in the smaller stuff like How It’s Good To Have Friends For Dinner Sometimes.   
Harvey finds this both charming and unsettling. His whole life has been determined by the pursuit of a few shining beliefs, but he’s still not sure if he believes anything as strongly as Gilda does.   
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, alright.” 

The first time Harvey saw him, Bruce was a ghost in a hospital bed, bloodless face and blasted, bottomless, eyes. There had been blood on his shirt, and it had seemed like the most real thing about him. The rest of his body was faded, like a figure in an old photograph.   
The Bruce that Harvey knows now is well over six feet tall, and his presence occupies whole rooms. He has a lot of different ways of smiling, but only one that he uses for people he actually likes, and it’s the one he uses when Harvey comes into the glass-walled office at the top of the Wayne Enterprises building. He is solid, substantial, and wearing a sleek black suit worth more money than Harvey’s house, which Harvey kind of hates a little bit.   
“I’m not here for any important reason,” Harvey says. “so if you’re busy I’ll leave.”  
“I can imagine nothing more important,” Bruce replies gravely, “than the pleasure of your company.”  
Harvey snorts and drops into the chair in front of Bruce’s desk, which is pretty comfortable for something that looks like it’s made of icicles. “That sounds rehearsed.”  
“It was, but I meant it anyway,” Bruce says.   
Harv doesn’t like Bruce. Doesn’t like being around him. He makes him squirmy and sour and mean. He doesn’t really like you, Harv hisses in the soft darkness at the back of Harvey’s skull. He’s arrogant. A liar. You should grab him by the hair and smash his mouth into his desk until he drowns on his own blood.   
Harvey stops listening. He usually stops listening at around the same time Harv starts offering suggestions. Instead he looks at Bruce, who is no longer smiling, but is instead looking at him with perfect focus, the serious and entire weight of his attention. It is, somehow, a better feeling than the smile.   
“I’m meeting with the biologist on Tuesday,” he says, for no real reason other than that the force of Bruce’s attention is incredibly intense.   
“Horticulturalist,” Bruce says.   
“Yeah. Isely.” Harvey sticks his legs out until they brush the glass leg of Bruce’s desk. “I can’t imagine what she wants, but maybe she’ll be interesting to talk to.”  
“I expect so,” Bruce replies evenly. “She is, after all, one of the most highly acclaimed scientists of her generation.”  
“Is she? See, I didn’t know that.” Harvey grins. “Have you been checking up on the people I have meetings with?”  
“Only some of them,” Bruce says, serenely unselfconscious. “It’s good for someone to know what you’re getting into, and that person is clearly not going to be you.”  
Bruce is, in his quiet and unobtrusive way, the most insanely paranoid person Harvey knows, and a part of Harvey loves him very deeply for it. Another part, of course, is still snarling burn out his eyes, cut him open, and clawing at Harvey’s ribs with fingers like black needles, the fingers of a charred corpse.   
“The hospital build is going okay?” Harvey asks, pinching the bridge of his nose.   
“Spectacularly. We’re actually ahead of schedule, which never happens. I mean that literally; in my experience, it’s never happened. I visited last weekend. George says that the only real issue has been clearing the vegetation on the island.”  
“George?”  
“The foreman. We’ve worked together before.”  
“Mm.” Bruce likes to know the names of the people who work for him, which is an impressively unlikely task given the fact that he runs a vast and sprawling international business empire. “Well. We have God on our side, I guess.”  
“God, money, and skilled professionals,” Bruce says.   
His voice is very even, as usual. Harvey wonders abruptly if Bruce actually believes in God. It’s not a thought that has ever really occurred to him before. Bruce seems so solidly a part of the world, so utterly isolated from the distant hypothetical of divinity.   
When she gets nervous, Gilda will sometimes murmur the shema to herself, almost unconsciously. Every yea, she lights a yahrzeit candle for the anniversary of her father’s death and lets it burn down to a grimy ring of wax on the counter. She makes bad latkes for Hannukah and good hamentaschen for Purim. When they were dating, he asked her why she did these things, if she believed in her mother’s God. I believe in something, she had said, and whatever it is, this is the best way I know how to honor it.   
He remembers his own mother’s fingers, with their blistered knuckles and ragged nails, sliding over the lacquer beads of her rosary, glossy and black as beetles. He thinks that all the people he loves best have believed in something untouchable.   
“You’re thinking about something,” Bruce says. His eyes are dark, reflective.  
Harvey puts his hands behind his head. “Something stupid,” he says.   
“Not usually,” Bruce replies, and Harvey grins, because for Bruce something like this is as close as you get to a declaration of eternal love.   
“Gilda wants you to come over for dinner,” he says. “I told her I didn’t want you classing up the place, but she insisted, and I am of course weak before her. Don’t feel like you have to say yes.”   
“I’m free Monday,” Bruce says, reaching for his planner.  
“Or you could say that,” Harvey allows.   
“Well, Gilda is the love of my life, and naturally I am always attempting to steal her away from you, so this is too good an opportunity to miss,” Bruce says without a trace of humor, flipping through the planner, which is, of course, glossy and black. “Will seven work?”   
“Seven-thirty,” Harvey says, unhappily. He knows himself too well to plan for leaving work on time. The odds are good that he’ll be late, even as things stand now.   
“Seven-thirty,” Bruce agrees. He makes a note in the planner and puts it down carefully next to his open briefcase. Bruce is neat to the point of dysfunction in his work affairs, although Harvey is completely certain that sometimes he forgets to brush his hair.   
“Great.” Harvey pushes the chair back. “I hope you like soup, because soup is usually what ends up happening in the Dent house.”  
“You say that like it’s an act of God or something.”  
“Technically we could make something else, but she’s busy and I’m lazy. We’ll put parmesan cheese on it for you.”  
“I’m glad I rate parmesan cheese. Are you going?”  
“Yeah.” Harvey stands, brushing his hands on his trousers. “That’s what I came her to tell you, and as much as I’d like to stay, I have to go do the law thing.”  
“Understood. Don’t work yourself to death.”  
Harvey laughs. “You’re worse than Gilda. Tell you what; I won’t if you won’t.”  
Bruce smiles, one of his quiet little smiles like a secret. “No promises.”   
On the way back down in the elevator, Harvey touches his face and discovers that he is smiling. He decides to allow himself to keep smiling until the elevator doors open and someone is there to see him besides the insect eye of the security camera. He always feels a little better after seeing Bruce. It’s why he came over in person when he and Bruce both know it would have been easier to call. Bruce makes him feel awake but also quiet. A lot of the time he feels half-asleep, not entirely in his body, and when he does feel fully awake it’s because something loud and painful is happening in his head. Bruce’s quiet voice and unshakably solid presence makes him feel aware, but also calm. Still.   
It’s the same way he feels around Gilda. It’s why he decided to spend the rest of his life with her. Maybe it’s just because Bruce has been around for so goddamn long and he knows everything, or almost everything, anyway. Maybe it’s because Bruce is his best friend. Is that true? He thinks it is. That’s a trip and a fucking half; his best friend, Bruce Wayne. If only the Alley kids could see him now.   
You should wait until he’s in here, says Harv, and then cut the elevator cable.   
“I’m not going to do that,” Harvey says out loud, as if saying it will make it more true.   
The elevator doors open with a muted whisper of escaping air. Harvey realizes he’s not smiling anymore. 

Gilda is sitting on the bed, staring at the wall. The window veils her face in haunted grey light. She does not move, does not speak. She has never been a large woman, but she looks too small, lost in her own body. Her face is wasted and waxy and blank.   
Harvey stands in the door and watches her. These kinds of things happen enough that they no longer terrify him the way they used to. Sometimes he’ll come home from work and she’ll be sitting on the floor of her studio with her head in her hands or standing at the kitchen sink, staring out the window, water rippling over her wrinkled fingertips. She says it’s not a big deal, it’s something she’s always done, and he has elected to believe her. It’s not like he doesn’t know how it is to slip in and out of the world. He wants to press her sometimes, but he doesn’t, because to do so would be to open the possibility of a mutual questioning, and that is a situation he has carefully avoided for many years.   
He loves Gilda. He loves her in a way that sometimes seems frightening and terrible; loves her so much that it hurts when he thinks about it. He wonders if there are words for the vast dark things that surface sometimes in the murk of her subconscious, like wrecked ships drifting back to the surface of the sea.   
“Honey,” he tries. There is no response. He notices that Gilda is holding a newspaper very tightly in her hand. Her fingernails, painted a delicate green, have torn into the thin pages.   
He puts his briefcase down and crosses the room. There’s just enough room to sit next to her on the bed. She blinks and starts suddenly, as if he has touched her, though he hasn’t. She turns her bright glassy eyes up to him and smiles a bright glassy smile.   
“Hi,” she says.   
“Hi,” he replies. He wishes she would stop smiling like that. “You doing ok?”  
“No,” she says, looking down at the newspaper. “Not really.”   
For a long moment she gazes at the paper, saying nothing.   
“Stacey Lynch killed herself,” she says finally.   
A cold flower opens in Harvey’s stomach, steel petals like blades. “Fuck,” he says numbly. It strikes him that he might be about to throw up. He digs his fingernails into his palm until the feeling passes.   
He remembers Stacey Lynch. A sweet kid, a paralegal. She had gone for a walk in Robinson Park on her way home from work one evening and ended the night by being assaulted by four men. Harvey had met with her in the hospital, two days later. Her lower lip was split almost in half and she could barely see—her glasses had broken and no one had yet thought to get her second pair from her apartment—but her eyes were hard and brilliant, and she had held her chin up like it was a sword.   
They won’t do this to anyone else, she had said. I’m going to stop them.   
She had give him names and descriptions and Harvey had started to get that quick hot feeling in the pit of his gut, the feeling he got when a case came together. He felt like a gun ready to fire. When he looked at Stacey Lynch, he saw that feeling reflected back at him.   
The trial had been going on for a week when Stacey Lynch had walked into the courtroom and withdrawn all charges. She had been mistaken. Her descriptions had been wrong. In fact, maybe nothing had happened at all. Astute observers had noted that she was missing three fingers from the knuckle down on her left hand.   
Harvey did not remember a lot of what had happened that day. He had left the courtyard and Harv had almost immediately taken over. In some ways he was grateful for that.   
Gilda had liked Stacey Lynch. They had met a few times. They had talked about books. Once Gilda had kissed her cheek.   
“Can I touch you?” Harvey asks.   
Gilda nods, and Harvey wraps his arms around her shoulders. Gilda buries her face in his chest. He feels the warm, uneven, rasp of her breath. Her hair smells like sweat and rain.   
The paper, now lying on the bed, informs him that Stacey Lynch hung herself in her apartment with an extension cord. Her girlfriend found the body.   
“I’m so angry,” Gilda whispers. “I’m so fucking angry.”  
Harvey holds her tighter, and says “I know,” because he does. He feels the quick savage rhythm of her heart, like a whisper against his skin.   
“I’m so angry,” Gilda says, and then, more softly, “Harvey, do you ever just want to—”  
She falls silent. He stirs and looks down at her. Her face is tilted into his chest; he can’t see her expression, just the dark fan of her eyelashes. “What?” he asks.   
She is silent for another long moment. He feels the presence of the unspoken answer inside her body, the terrible weight of it, like the weight of a corpse. Stacey Lynch’s corpse.   
“Nothing,” she says finally. She presses her face against him, shuts her eyes.   
Harvey feels suddenly, absurdly, tired; too tired to be awake, too tired to be alive. He knows he could press the issue, and there’s even a chance she might tell him, but to do so would be to violate that silent but terribly important trust, the glass wall between them that keeps them safe from each other. In his darker moments, Harvey sometimes that their marriage is built as much on the things they’ve left unspoken as on the things that they know and love about each other.   
So he says nothing. He holds Gilda, because he loves her. For now, that’s enough. 

As he expects, he’s late to dinner on Monday. He doesn’t even notice the clock until it’s seven-forty, and he drives home in a tearing hurry, blasting through more red lights than a DA really should. Someone sticks their middle finger out the window at him. He can’t remember the last time that happened.   
When he gets home, the house smells like pepper and chicken stock and the TV is on. He can hear voices, Gilda’s and a lower one, quiet and rumbling, which he identifies as Bruce. He puts his briefcase down by the door and goes into the living room. Jeopardy is on. Bruce is sitting on the couch, watching intently, and Gilda is standing in the corner with an oven mitt on, alternately watching him and the screen with clear amusement. Pale blue light plays across both their faces from the screen, making them ghostly and strange.   
“This is a traditional raspberry flavoring,” Alex Trebek says tonelessly.   
“Beaver anuses,” Bruce says instantly, leaning forward.   
Gilda lets out a sharp bark of a laugh. “What? That’s not real.”  
“Yes, it is. Beaver anuses. Look it up.”  
On the TV, a young man in a T-shirt doubtfully says “What is raspberries?”  
“How do you even know that?” Harvey asks, coming into the room. “Hi. Sorry I’m late.”   
“Actually, your brilliant wife anticipated that would be the case, so dinner is still in the making,” Bruce says, still staring raptly at the TV.   
“He’s lying, we ate already. No dinner for you.” Gilda comes over and kisses him on the cheek. “Hey, honey.”   
Harvey squeezes her arm. “Anything I can do to help?”  
“Grate some parmesan,” Gilda says. “We’re going all-out.”   
The soup is some sort of Italian thing with little meatballs in it. The table feels oddly but not unpleasantly crowded with Bruce sitting next to him. Harvey watches the parmesan melt into a little white island on the surface of the soup. The presence of Bruce and Gilda is like a pair of walls, not confining but sheltering. He wonders if it’s weird for him to think that.   
“So I saw Batman today,” Gilda says.   
Bruce raises his eyebrows mildly. “Really? Where?”  
“I was outside the bank and he was punching someone on the roof. The Riddler, I think. I didn’t see him for very long but there was a crowd of people watching and cheering. Some of them were cheering the Riddler.”  
“Assholes,” Harvey says cheerfully.   
“I don’t know. It seems appropriate,” Bruce says.   
Harvey groans. “Not this again.”  
Gilda glances between them, her eyes bright. “Not what again?”  
“Bruce and his weird Batman vendetta.”   
“I don’t have a vendetta against him,” Bruce says evenly. “I just think it’s irresponsible for him to try to fix the city by personally punching people he disagrees with. We have a justice system for that reason.”  
“Yeah, and God knows the justice system functions perfectly and has no flaws,” Harvey replies darkly.   
“Of course it has flaws, but that just proves we need more people like you. Not people like him.”   
“Without people like him, I would probably be dead,” Harvey says. “Do you have any idea how many times he’s saved my life?”  
“Principally from threats that didn’t exist before he showed up,” Bruce points out coolly.   
Helplessly, Harvey looks over at his wife. “Gilda. Help me out here.”  
Gilda twirls her spoon between her fingers. “I don’t know,” she says idly. “Bruce may have a point.”   
Bruce makes a satisfied noise. Harvey gasps, putting his hand to his heart. “Betrayal! My own wife, turning on me.”  
“I’m not turning on you, I’m turning on Batman. And there is a reason that people don’t just, I don’t know, shoot people who commit crimes against them. We live in a civilized society. We have laws. Honestly, I think you of all people would understand that.”   
Harvey looks at her sharply. She meets his gaze, unblinking. Bruce bends his head over his soup, studiously slurping up a meatball.   
“I do what I do because I know the justice system is deeply corrupt and inefficient,” Harvey says, after a moment. His voice is level; he’s pleased about that. “Batman does what he does for the same reason. If we lived in a perfect world, he wouldn’t exist, but we don’t, and I think we need him.”   
“It’s just the lack of self-control that offends me,” Gilda says. Her voice sounds oddly flat. Her soup bowl is almost empty, and the spoon scrapes against the porcelain. “God knows that sometimes it feels like the right thing to do is to go out and deal with all the fuckers yourself, but you can’t. You can’t. No matter how much you want to.”   
“I don’t think that lack of self-control is the issue,” Harvey says. “That was not the impression that I got from him.”   
Bruce’s head comes up. “You’ve met him?”  
Harvey laughs dryly. “Yeah. A couple times. Just, y’know, in the course of business.”   
“Really.” Bruce has the look on his face that he gets sometimes, like he’s not quite smiling but he’s thinking really hard about it. “What was he like?”  
Harvey bites down his own grin at that. “Weird. Rigid. He does this stupid voice when he speaks. I had to keep fighting not to offer him a lozenge. And he’s not good at facial expressions. His mouth doesn’t move, like, at all.”   
“The man dresses like a bat,” Gilda says. “I think a little weirdness is to be expected.”   
“He sounds unsettling,” Bruce says.   
Harvey shrugs. “Gordon trusts him, and I trust Gordon. It’s not that complicated.”   
Bruce smiles a little. “Your taste in allies is questionable.”   
The response to that is so obvious that Harvey almost feels bad about saying it, but he does anyway. “I’m friends with you, aren’t I?”   
Bruce’s smile grows wider, warmer. Gilda throws back her head and groans. “I want a divorce.”   
“No, you can’t divorce me, your soup is too good,” Harvey says.   
“Yeah. I provide the soup, you provide the sitcom dialogue. And Bruce can answer all the Jeopardy questions. The perfect marriage.”   
Harvey’s heart squeezes painfully behind his ribs. He laughs, and hopes it sounds natural.   
“Id, ego, and superego,” Bruce says. He looks much younger when he smiles.   
Harvey clears the table while Gilda washes and Bruce dries. It’s weird seeing Bruce Wayne standing in their little one-counter kitchen, taking up most of the room, washing plates with a stained dishrag and chatting happily with Gilda about the hospital build, about how when they were kids Harvey said hey there should be a better hospital for kids, this one is bullshit, and the wisdom of that statement apparently lingered in Bruce’s consciousness forevermore. Bruce has always been a part of Harvey’s life, but combining him with this domestic business, normal and unromantic as soap, makes the whole thing new somehow. Strange, but not in a bad way. Like flexing a limb that’s been asleep for a long time.   
There are little white scars on Bruce’s knuckles, the kind you get from a lot of fighting over a fairly substantial period of time. They’ve been there for years, ever since Bruce left the city when they were both teenagers. He was gone for a long time, as Harvey trudged through college and law school, feeling more alone than he had ever been. Harvey doesn’t know what Bruce did during those long missing years. He hasn’t asked. He doesn’t know if Bruce would answer him if he did. He doesn’t know if Bruce would tell him the truth.   
Gilda finds Bruce attractive. He can tell. He knows how to read the tilt of her hips, the way she laughs. It doesn’t bother him as much as he expects it to, mostly because if she didn’t find him attractive he would doubt both her sanity and her eyesight. After all these years, Harvey is very used to the concept of people thinking that Bruce is attractive. It’s a conclusion that he himself came to a long time ago, at around the same time he became aware that Bruce could probably take him in a fight.   
Halfway through cleaning the table, he goes to the bathroom. When he comes back, he pauses in the doorway for a moment, listening to the murmur of the water, the layered harmony of Bruce and Gilda’s voices, indistinct but audible. He can see them both from the back, silhouetted in warm golden light against the frozen night beyond the big window. They are leaning towards each other, slightly, Bruce’s big body and Gilda’s much smaller one. He notices how the inherent stiffness of Bruce’s frame, his unbreakable, cultivated, posture, has gentled, become soft. Awkward, almost. Bruce never allows himself to become awkward unless he feels safe. It takes a lot to make Bruce feel safe. It took Harvey years to find that same gentleness in him, that awkwardness.   
Gilda has her face turned up to him, like a flower, smiling. She says something and Bruce laughs. Harvey can feel the laugh in his bones.   
He thinks, this should bother me. This should upset me. I should feel jealous of someone in this situation.   
Gilda hands Bruce a glass and he starts drying it with neat, careful, strokes of the rag. Gilda is still smiling, her face lit up like a whole sky of stars. Bruce’s smile is a different kind of glow, more distant, more delicate, like Christmas lights. Harvey looks at them and he feels the answer to their light somewhere in his chest, like a moth trapped inside him, trying desperately to fly to their brightness.   
He looks away. There’s still some soup in his bowl. If he puts plastic wrap on it, he can eat it for lunch tomorrow. 

Pamela Isely is younger than he expected, and almost shockingly beautiful, with her endless legs and bright flood of scarlet hair. She wears a green dress; Harvey meets her in the back of Chez Daniel, the table by the kitchen doors. He both likes and distrusts her instantly. Her perfume is sweet, with a bewitchingly putrid note at the bottom of it, like rotten cherry blossoms. There’s something in her perfect smile that reminds him of a wound, a broken bone.   
“Dr. Isely,” he says, holding out his hand to her.   
“Mr. Dent,” she replies, taking it in hers. Her skin is just a little bit too damp. “Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me.”  
“Any excuse to eat the best steak in the city,” Harvey replies. He pulls out Isely’s chair for her and she acquiesces gracefully, pouring herself into it like some dark-eyed film noir villainess. Her perfume is, for a moment, so strong it’s almost nauseating.   
She orders pasta with seafood, which comes as a bit of a surprise; for some reason he had expected her to be a vegetarian. The horticulturalist thing, maybe. He orders the steak, which really is the best in the city, bloody and smoky and rich. Isely gets a bottle of white to go with the fish, and Harvey accepts one glass with some hesitation and an internal commitment to stop at one. He doesn’t think he should be drunk for this conversation. Besides, it doesn’t really go with the meat. They talk about politics until the food comes and Isely apparently decides to change the subject.  
“I’ve been following your career,” she says lightly, turning a pale wad of pasta around her fork.   
“How about that,” Harvey replies. People are always saying this to him and he’s never quite sure how to respond. “I wish I could tell you the same, but unfortunately I don’t have much opportunity to keep abreast of scientific news. I did look you up this morning, though.”  
“Did you?” That smile, again, sweet with a core of malformation, like her perfume. “You weren’t disappointed, I hope.”  
“The opposite, actually. Your trajectory has been amazing. I only understand about half the headlines about you and your work, but what I did get was pretty incredible.”  
The smile gentles, becomes less artificial. “You’re very kind. I would say I’ve been lucky, but the would be false modesty, and I get the feeling you’re not the kind of man who indulges such behavior.”   
“Honesty is the best policy,” Harvey says, trying to decide if you’re not the kind of man who indulges such behavior is a really weird thing to say or not. It’s hard to determine. He’s not thinking clearly tonight.   
“I’ve always thought so.” Isely puts her fork down on her plate and gazes at him evenly. “We have a number of things in common, I think.”  
“We do?”  
“Oh, yes. We’ve both had unprecedented success at a young age; we’re both intelligent, ambitious, and outspoken; we’ve both made enemies. Admittedly, my enemies may be less spectacular than yours.”   
Harvey laughs, a little more stiffly than he intended to. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve heard that botany can be pretty brutal.”  
“You have no idea,” Isely says. “Tell me, Mr. Dent, are you at all familiar with the name Rosaceae vularis?”  
“Should I be?” Harvey asks. He spears another bit of steak on his fork but doesn’t eat it. His stomach is shifting within him, liquid and sour. He shouldn’t have had that wine. The meat is too rich. Her perfume is too strong.  
“Yes,” Isely says. “You should. It’s a very interesting organism, sometimes also called the wild thorny rose. It stands about six inches tall, with bright red flowers. The flowers can be used to sterilize wounds and drive away insects. Their scent is astringent, but not unpleasant. I myself find it quite enjoyable. And, of course, the species is highly endangered. It’s always been rare, but these days, due to pesticides and deforestation, it only survives in about six locations worldwide. Two in the Ukraine, on the banks of a river. One in a partially submerged forest in Korea. One in Peru; one in Oregon. And one here in Gotham, of all places.”   
“Is that so,” Harvey says distantly. He’s starting to sweat. He can feel it gathering under his arms, on the back of his neck, damp and foul. The light bouncing off Isely’s glass seems sticky, too bright. He wonders if he’s allowed to excuse himself to the restroom. He wonders what exactly is happening right now.   
“Oh, yes. On the southern tip of Stonegate Island. There’s a complex watershed effect there, ensuring that the polluted water hasn’t quite managed to do away with them yet. And, of course, the island has been uninhabited for many years; no people to destroy the flowers. Isn’t that amazing, Mr. Dent? Our own home-grown Gotham miracle.”  
I’m dissociating, Harvey thinks. That has to be what’s happening. That’s why it feels like I can’t move my body. That’s why it sounds like her voice is many voices all speaking at once.   
“There are no endangered plants on the island,” he says. He hears a slur in his voice, a drone that seems to pull all the way from the back of his skull. “We had the whole area zoned. I went over the report myself. Nothing there but sawgrass and brown moths.”  
“Yes,” Isely says calmly. “And that might even seem convincing if I hadn’t seen the report myself, in its original form, where the presence of Rosaceae vularis on the island was thoroughly documented. And if I hadn’t also seen the version that Wayne Industries chose to make available to the public, complete except for one section, which had clearly been deliberately omitted.”  
In the back of his head, Harvey’s heartbeat begins to roar and thrash like some vast monster beneath the earth. “There was only one report,” he manages. “The one that came to my office was the one we published.”  
A toxic spasm of nausea hits him with such desperate intensity that he loses all ability to speak.   
“You see, that’s another way we’re similar, Mr. Dent,” Isely says. She leans forward over the table. “We’re both liars.”  
A small, shrill, part of Harvey’s brain is shrieking not lying, that’s what happened, that’s the truth. The majority of him is occupied with the utter chaos taking control of his body. A mouth of wet, hot, pain opens up in his stomach, tearing through his intestines. He feels his mouth fall open.   
“There’s another thing you should probably know about this plant,” Isely says. Her eyes are changing colour, like light on an oil slick, but that’s impossible, isn’t it? It’s impossible. “It can produce a very powerful and fast-acting poison, which targets the kidneys, and you’ve been drinking it in your wine for the past half hour. It’s clearly taking effect now. In just a little bit, I’ll get to start screaming for help, for someone to call an ambulance. That’s always my favorite part. It’s so entertaining.”  
“What,” Harvey whispers. He wants to scream, to tear at her face with his fingernails, but his throat is sealing up, filling with fluid. “Why—”  
Isely sighs, almost theatrically. This is, at least partially, a performance to her, Harvey realizes dimly. A ritual enactment. “You know, I actually had some hopes for you,” she says. “I thought you might be able to make some change in this shit town. It’s a shame you’re just like the rest of the rich bastards, really.”  
The world fades at the edges, like an overexposed photograph. You crazy bitch, he tries to say, but nothing comes out. And maybe it’s not him saying it, anyway. It’s hard to tell. Things are blurry here. Blurring in. Bluring out. Moving like the dreamlike sway of seaweed in the bay.   
His head collapses inward, a black hole turning his brain inside out. Someone is screaming. It’s a woman. She’s saying Harvey you have to get out. You have to hide. You have to get out now. She’s saying I love you. She’s saying help please someone call an ambulance I think he’s having some sort of fit I think he’s dying


	2. Part 2

Things happen like ads in the background. Twenty hours of complete darkness on the Harvey Dent channel, interspersed with loud bright commercials featuring a lot of people in white talking very quickly and the persistent smell of antiseptics and soap. Early on, there’s a beautiful red-haired woman who cries and cries, her fine white hands pressed to her mouth. Harvey thinks you perfidious shit without much real feeling.   
It occurs to him that she must be extremely confident that he’s going to die, or else she wouldn’t be sticking around. He’s surprised by how much this thought relieves him. There’s a clarity in it, almost a cleanness. He exhales into the darkness and sees his breath dissolve like dandelion clocks.   
It’s kind of stupid; all the ridiculous things he’s done, all the reasons he might actually deserve to die, and here he is, murdered by someone he doesn’t know for something he didn’t do. Well, here it is, Dent. Here’s that universal justice you’ve been looking for all this time. Here it is, and it tastes like poison. It tastes like a job you didn’t do quite well enough.   
He smells the delicate, complex aroma of disease and the much more straightforward smell of industrial-strength cleaning products and knows that he’s in the hospital. Fingers made of pale green tile reach down to brush over his face. He can’t remember a time he’s ever been happy to be in a hospital. On some level, of course, being in a hospital is a good thing; it means that the hurting thing is probably over and the part that hurts less has started. But being in the hospital also necessitates that the hurting thing happened in the first place, and now has to be dealt with. Harvey cannot recall a single good thing that has happened to him in a hospital.   
Well, that’s not exactly true. There’s at least one thing. One really good thing.   
She has the courage of her convictions, Harv says. Have to give her that. After we burn her alive.   
We’re not burning anyone alive. We can’t do anything like that anymore. We’re dying, you stupid fuck, and that means you lost. You fucking lost.   
The pain comes and goes, liquid and terrible. He opens his eyes and Gilda is there. Her face is very thin-looking, sort of trembly, pale as porridge. She’s not crying, and he thinks oh, I really am dying. When it gets too serious for Gilda to cry, it’s very serious indeed.   
She sees him smile and open his eyes and inhales sharply, a slick brightness in her eyes. A smile crosses her face. It’s weak and quivery and he’s never seem anything more beautiful. He digs in his throat and discovers his voice is still there, albeit in a somewhat small, dry, form. “Hey,” he whispers, and then, because the odds are good that they might not get to speak again and some things matter more than others, “I love you so much.”  
She laughs wetly. “I love you too, Harvey.”  
There’s a smoky blur behind her. Harvey blinks, the pain his head purifying to a high pitch, and sees a face. Dark eyes, soft lips. A part of Harvey loosens, like a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Of course Bruce is here. Bruce has to be here, at the end. He wonders if this is really happening. He wonders if it matters.   
“Listen,” he says. Every word drags out of his throat like a razor and the world is pinched and dark, but he feels the things he has to say driving him, like they always have, all his life. “It was Isely. The botanist. She did something—there was some kind of rose—”  
“We know,” Gilda says. “The police are looking for her.”  
“Oh,” Harvey says dimly. “Good.” He has no idea how they figured that out, but it’s one less thing to worry about in however much time he has left. Another hard white burst of pain goes off in his stomach, like lightning in a dark sky.   
“So this is happening,” he says, and he laughs, and that hurts too.   
A ripple of something unnameable crosses Bruce’s face. “Harvey,” he says, and Harvey realizes he sort of wants to cry, and wow, that’s really fucking painful; the tears burn in his throat like oven cleaner. He can’t cry. He doesn’t have time, and it hurts too much.   
“Maybe I should be glad,” he says. His voice doesn’t feel like it’s coming from him, but from some indistinct area around his head. “I’m going before he could do any of it. All the shit he wanted to do. I never let him do it, and now he’ll never get the chance. So that’s good, I guess.”  
“What?” Gilda whispers. Her voice is ragged, her eyes glazed. Harvey looks at her and feels a terrible, sick, pulse of guilt. All the things she doesn’t know. All the things he never told her, the person he trusts most on this earth. All the things he never said because he trusts her, because she’s a good person, and because if she knew what he was she would not love him. He’s always known this, known it with a terrible impassive clarity, carried it in his heart like shrapnel from an old wound.   
But fuck that. If there’s ever been a time to be brave, it’s now. Now, when it doesn’t really matter.   
“You guys,” he says. “Come here.” He can’t feel the tips of his fingers, but with what seems like an almost supernatural effort, he lifts his hands. He can see them trembling. He thinks of his father, lying in his bed in the rest home, his knotted hands shaking so hard they can barely hold his pills, shaking so hard it’s like they’re trying to shake themselves apart.   
Gilda takes his hand, her grip so hard it hurts, but in a good way, a way that feels real. After a moment, Bruce takes his other hand. His eyes are black mirrors.   
“I love you,” Harvey says. “I love you both so much. You’re the best people I know. And this is—it’s a good thing, isn’t it? How we are, when we’re together. The three of us. It’s good. It feels safe.”  
He’s starting to drift. He can feel it now. It was lifting his hands that did it. Darkness passes in front of his vision like black static, but Bruce and Gilda’s hands are solid in his grasp, and for a hallucinatory moment he thinks he can feel the thing that moves between them, the singing highway of light that links his malfunctioning heart to theirs, like a shared veins. It’s kind of a weird image, but it feels right. Three people in one body. The Trinity. He almost laughs.   
“I wish I could have had this,” he says. He barely knows what he’s saying. His voice is separate from him, a ghost voice. “Us, the three of us. I don’t know if you’re allowed to love two people at once, but if you can, I would love you two. My best friends. The loves of my life.”  
Gilda breathes in again, the edges of her inhale damp and uneven. Bruce’s face is locked, pale and rigid as a death mask. Harvey looks at them through the darkness that is rushing back into the world, rushing back into his head and filling his body with roaring silence.   
Bruce pulls his hand away from Harvey’s, and Harvey’s hand falls back to the bed. There is no longer any feeling in it.   
“I’m sorry,” Bruce says, his voice quick and almost inaudible. “I need to go. I have to—I have something I need to do.”  
He turns on his heel and walks out of the room, his leather shoes clicking against the tiles.   
Harvey thinks oh, and doesn’t think anything else after that. Gilda turns back to him. The world folds in on itself. 

He had met Bruce when they were eight, in Gotham General. Harvey was there because he was always there, and Bruce was there for reasons of temporary convenience. Bruce the little ghost, grey and strange and very still. Harvey, floating drowsily on fuzzy waves of painkillers, had thought at first that he was dead, and wondered why they were putting this corpse in the bed next to him. Then Bruce had moved. He put his head in his hands. Harvey had seen the Technicolor splash of blood on his shirt, and the dark hard rings of it under his fingernails.   
“Hey,” Harvey had said, and Bruce had looked up.   
Harvey knew that he probably hadn’t looked fantastic. Bruce was unharmed, physically at least; Harvey was sitting pretty on top of two broken ribs, a split lip, and what the medical bill would describe as ‘multiple minor lacerations’. He had woken up in the hospital. He had no idea if his father was there, or intending to come back at all. Even with the sweet haze of the drugs, every heartbeat hurt, a deep sore throb.   
Bruce’s eyes had been like dark wells, like the bottom of the ocean. Harvey looked into them and saw nothing, a nameless, endless, silence. It was a look he had seen in his own eyes, more than once. Now that the weird bloody kid was looking at him, he wasn’t sure what to say, or why he had spoken at all.  
“It’s okay,” he said finally, because that was what the people in the hospital always said to him. It was part of the medical ritual, as necessary and precise as the painkillers and the chilly fluorescents.   
Bruce seemed to consider this for a long moment. His small face was very still.   
“No,” he said, after a long moment. “No, it’s not.” He spoke with quiet, unshakable certainty, stating a fact of the universe, like gravity or the rotation of the earth. He did not seem angry or even upset.   
Harvey stared at him. It occurred to him that Bruce was right. Things were not okay. They definitely weren’t okay for him, and they probably weren’t okay for this kid either, with his dead eyes and bloody shirt. It was a strange realization to have, like a strobe of light going off in a dark room, illuminating everything in an instant of terrible lucidity. Things were not okay, no matter what all the grown-ups were saying. Things were, in fact, pretty goddamn terrible, and they weren’t going to be getting better anytime soon.   
In the numb middle of his body, in the collision of the pain and the drugs, he felt a bewildering rush of affection for this kid, who had said the truth like it was easy to say. It wasn’t okay. It was fucking awful. It wasn’t okay, and being allowed to say that was astonishing, like returning to reality after being lost in a nightmare.   
“I’m Harvey,” he offered.   
“I’m Bruce,” said the kid. He was silent for a long moment, and then he said “My parents are dead.”

Hospital white walls open cold wind tear it out bright bloody hurting move move you stupid piece of shit you stupid fuck stupid stupid. Don’t stop don’t  
Only one moment not enough time get out of the bed hurts fuck hurts clothes don’t touch me face in the mirror isn’t right cold floor slippery sweat and piss and bile kiss me bitch give me some of that heat not here not happening not real have to go NOW NOW FUCKING NOW they’ll hurt us they’ll hurt him with the needles you can’t send me back can’t make me you can’t touch me here now real now red box heart red steel heart curtains push door faces like black holes keep walking doesn’t matter not people rats worms insects worms on the bloody face he’s coming no he’s not gone gone for years there’s the door don’t stop it’s right there get out go christ fucking hurts make it worth it   
green scrubs bedpan pretty mr dent where are you going mr dent please get back in bed you’re not well shut up bitch cunt can’t stop me don’t hand on the arm don’t fucking touch me she’s not real she’s not real she doesn’t matter hand in her mouth crunch of teeth red knuckles sweet feeling like the good thing that happens impact she’s on the floor listen to that listen she’s crying isn’t that the best sound in the world isn’t it good hit her again do it hit her again  
moving faster now the sky is turning over the other ones are coming green scrubs again very good blood contrast bigger too big not real don’t hurt him don’t hurt me won’t let you hurt him run fucking run grabbing me hurts break the arm not breaking bruises hurts screaming now throat torn up hand on my mouth DON’T DO THAT DON’T DO THAT I HATE YOU can’t breathe too many of them holding me down like it used to be too many faces laughing at me burn in hell kill you kill you don’t stop don’t put the needle in rat people worm people skin you alive burn your eyes out don’t want to go back don’t want to be back in the dark my boy my body too dizzy too fucking weak pathetic can’t run where’s dad where’s Gilda

Harvey dreams about an earthquake that swallows Gotham, dragging the entire city into the ground. He wakes up; it’s evening. The sky outside is illuminated with a crisp fall sunset, cherry and orange, bright as an oil slick. The room is empty. His body hurts, a slow savage ache gnawing its way into his bones, the way the cold does in winter.   
He takes a moment to reflect on the fact that he does not appear to be dead. He doesn’t know how he feels about that.   
The door opens and Gilda edges her way in, her arms piled with a bright heap of vending-machine plastic. She gets a few steps into the room before she notices him staring at her. All expression rushes out of her face, leaving it blank as paper, and then she smiles. It’s a good smile, sweeter and stronger than the most recent smile he dimly remembers seeing on her face, the dead leaf smile. There are tears in her eyes. He loves her with a kind warm ache that is somehow bigger than the ache in his body.   
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, and he lifts his arm to wave, and realizes that he can’t move. He looks down to see leather straps around his wrists, like thin brown hands holding him to the bed. Beneath the sheet the pressure of other straps around his ankles makes itself known. He stares at his wrists for a moment, uncomprehending, and then a wave of white panic crashes over him, annihilating the world in electrical static, and it’s happening, they know, they found out, God it’s finally happening. The straps gnaw hungrily into his skin.   
“It’s okay,” Gilda says quickly. “It’s alright. Calm down, sweetheart.”   
He looks up at her, his heart screaming against his ribs. Her face is serious but open. She’s not lying. And it doesn’t matter if she is; he can’t lose it, not with her here. He fights back the hot pressure in the back of his skull, like an inflamed sore about to burst.   
“What happened?” he asks, and he almost adds did I hurt anyone but bites it back and says nothing instead. Gilda does not answer immediately. She dumps her snacks onto the chair and then sits on the foot of the bed, next to the ankles he now knows are restrained. The mountain of snacks sitting in the chair, like a third participant in the conversation, is not insignificant. He wonders how long she’s been here.   
“They found the Isely woman,” Gilda says. Her voice is not quite even. “She’s being held in Arkham, pending trial. The Commissioner says she’s—some sort of human-plant hybrid. I didn’t understand very much of it. But they found her, and she’s locked up now.”  
“How am I still alive?” Harvey rasps. This seems like the most pressing question; he was sure he was dying. He could feel himself dying, could feel parts of his body shutting down.   
Gilda smiles, a thin bright smile. “Batman,” she says softly. “He came to the hospital. Isely was using some sort of genetically modified version of the thorny rose spores, and none of the antidotes were working. But he got a sample of the poison from your blood, and he synthesized an antidote. Said that you matter too much to Gotham to die.”  
“Huh,” Harvey says, after a moment. Batman saved his life, again. Every heartbeat he can feel, reverberating inside his body, he owes to Batman. It’s not a new thought, but it’s always a strange one. He’s alive, anyway; that’s the basic truth here. He’s still alive. And there are worse people to owe your life to.   
The straps on his wrists are too heavy. “Why am I tied down?” he asks Gilda, even though most of him really, really, does not want to know the answer.  
Gilda’s face tightens, but she meets his eyes. “You tried to leave,” she says. “You got up and tried to leave, and when one of the nurses stopped you, you hit her in the face. They had to sedate you. I didn’t want them to use the straps, but they said you might still be violent when you woke up.”  
A grey haze spreads across the front of Harvey’s brain, like frost on a window. “Oh,” he says, and is unable to say anything else. He is suddenly, acutely, aware of the shapeless dark spaces in his mind, like cigarette burns, spaces where those memories should be. He is also aware of his own body in the way that he sometimes is, as an inanimate object, something that does not wholly or distinctly belong to him. Something that is not always on his side.   
You should be grateful, Harv says. They were trying to hurt us. I was just getting us out.   
Harvey closes his eyes. He can feel the hot infected pounding in his skull, swelling like some sort of horrible music.   
“They said it was probably a temporary psychotic reaction to the antidote, since it was untested,” Gilda says. Harvey opens his eyes and looks at her. Her face is beautiful and perfectly composed and Harvey understands, in an awful, unfeeling, moment, that she does not really believe this; that she knows that it wasn’t really a reaction to the drugs, because of course she does, because she’s lived with him for five years and she’s not an idiot. No matter how hard he tries, there are always those moments, when he says the wrong thing in the wrong tone or moves the wrong way or doesn’t know something he should know. The nights he goes out and can’t tell her what he was doing when he comes back, because he genuinely doesn’t know any more than she does. And none of the people at the hospital were there for any of that, but Gilda was, and even if she doesn’t know what happened for sure, she’s at least guessed that it wasn’t the drugs.   
So this is it, then. This is the crisis moment. She knows that something’s wrong, and that means she’ll eventually find out what it is, and that means she’ll be gone. And after her, everything else will go too. He can see it in his head, the slow disintegration, the architectural unfolding of his life, beginning here. Everything that he has he owes to a silence thick and cold as ice on a frozen lake, and only now that he’s stranded in the middle of it can he see the cracks reaching for him from the shore.   
“Harvey,” Gilda says. He doesn’t want to look at her. He doesn’t know what will happen if he looks at her. He stares at the greyish expanse of blankets in front of him. What she says now is very, very, important.   
Gilda is silent for a moment, and then she says “Bruce was here. Do you remember that?”  
Harvey shuts his eyes again, because he does remember that, sort of, and he really wishes he didn’t. Bruce’s blank plaster face, tight with some unnameable frozen thing. Bruce walking away, just a little bit too quickly. It occurs to him that this vague memory might be the last time he, Bruce, and Gilda will ever be in a room together. It occurs to him that this is his fault; he thought it would be the poison that killed him, but, as usual, he’s survived that and managed to create this mess entirely on his own. At least he’s consistent.   
Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe this is all a dream, and he’s still dying.   
“Harvey,” Gilda says again. “There are some things we need to talk about.”   
“No,” he says compulsively, less a disagreement than a denial that this situation is happening at all.   
Gilda draws in a breath. “We can’t ignore this, honey. We have to talk about it.”  
“I can’t,” Harvey says. He sounds weak, even to himself. He fucking hates that. Pussy, Harv says. “I can’t talk about it right now.”   
“Harvey,” Gilda says. Her voice sounds like she’s talking to a child. She sounds so sad.   
Harvey closes his eyes and rolls over in the bed. “Please,” he says to the heavy darkness inside his skull. “I just woke up. I can’t talk about this right now. Give me some time to rest.”  
A long moment of nothing. He can hear the soft pull and release of her breathing, the way he can when they’re lying in bed at night.   
“Okay,” she says. Her voice is thin, deflated. “We don’t have to talk about this right now. I’m sorry.”  
He wants to open his eyes, to sit up and pull her into his arms. He wants to tell her everything and hold her and kiss her, the way he’s supposed to do. The way he would if he were a real person. He does nothing. He closes his eyes even tighter, and watches the pale dots and patches of light move behind his eyelids. They look almost like the outlines of faces, but not faces that he knows. 

They let him out a few days later. He’s still feeling shaky and weak, and he can’t handle heavy food, but he can walk by himself and he only has to stop to sit down once on the way to the car. Gilda drives them home. They listen to a mix CD he made her a few months ago; he started making her mix CDs in college and just never really got out of the habit. They talk a little bit about the book she’s reading, and she fills him in on recent political news, and then they’re quiet. It takes a lot of energy to talk. The sky is grey and smooth and featureless.   
He stays in bed for the next week, eating toast and watching the Discovery Channel. Harv is strangely quiet, and so Harvey spends the seven days largely in his own company, and sometimes Gilda’s. He does’t talk to her as much as he should, he knows. It’s just that he doesn’t have anything else to say, which is upsetting on a lot of levels. He’s a lawyer. His whole life is built on words, on truth. For the first few days he lives in rigid terror that she’s going to ask him about Bruce, or what happened in the hospital, but after the first seventy-two hours of radio silence he allows himself to relax a little. She’s probably waiting for him to raise the issue, waiting until he feels comfortable talking about it. He’s quite happy to keep her waiting.   
He doesn’t know which issue he wants to talk about less. It doesn’t matter. They’re connected, in some arcane way that he senses but can’t precisely identify. He’s never been particularly gifted at introspection. Whenever he tries, it seems like the only thing he succeeds in digging up is new layers of rot and scar tissue.   
He feels bad about relying on Gilda to bring him toast and milk. She isn’t a caretaker by nature. He decides to have a new and interesting factoid from the TV for her every time she comes with food, to provide some sort of exchange.   
These are the issues which occupy him for his week of enforced rest. The next Monday, he puts on his suit and goes to work. Technically he’s supposed to be in bed for another week, but he feels alright, and work is good for him. Always has been. He’s keeping down most of what he eats, and besides, he sits at a desk all day. It is not a disastrously strenuous job.   
Everyone at work is very excited to see him, which comes as a pleasant surprise. Dana cries a little into his shirt, which makes him both pleased and somewhat uncomfortable. Someone leaves a cupcake on his desk, crowned with a delicate swirl of sky-blue icing. He has to throw it out—even the thought of eating it makes his stomach spasm painfully—but the gesture is not lost on him. He realizes that he has somehow conveyed the impression to all these likable, trustworthy, people that he is also likable and trustworthy, a realization which is reassuring and also disconcerting.   
He blacks out very briefly towards the end of the day. It only lasts for half a minute. He’s sitting in his office chair and he blinks and the file that was in his hand is on the floor. At first panic sinks white teeth into his brain, but then he checks the clock and sees that almost no time has passed. It’s probably just exhaustion. He is, after all, still recovering from an attempt on his life. And Harv has barely spoken at all in a week.   
Gilda orders in Japanese food and is displeased with him. “You should have come home,” she says. “You have to take care of yourself.”  
“I am taking care of myself,” Harvey says, through a mouthful of rice.   
Gilda’s mouth pulls inward. She puts her plastic chopsticks down. “Harvey,” she says.   
There is a mild caution in her tone which Harvey instantly recognizes as her we-need-to-talk voice. He gulps his rice and says quickly “You know, Dana cried on me today?”  
“That’s sweet, I guess,” Gilda says cautiously.   
“Maybe. I’m going to have to dry-clean my shirt.”  
Gilda snorts. “You are the unimaginable worst,” she says, but she’s smiling, and it’s over; he’s knocked her off-balance and she won’t push him. Not yet, anyway. Warm clear relief opens up in his chest and he says “Should I risk some of the chicken, or would that count as self-destructive behavior?”  
In the night, Gilda mutters and twists, knotting herself up in the blankets. Her face curls in like a crumpled plastic bag. Sweat glistens on her skin. Harvey sits next to her and watches her. He doesn’t know what to do. Usually he’s not the one placed in this position.   
Eventually she cries out, a soft little sound like a child, and he touches her face and whispers “Gilda.” Her eyes open, blind spotlights in the dark. He pulls back involuntarily. When he’s having a nightmare, Gilda has to shake him and shake him to break him out of it.   
She sits up. A dark silhouette of sweat remains on the pillow behind her. Her face is blank. “What time is it?” she asks, and then she says “Oh, God,” and buries her face in her hands.   
Harvey wraps his arms around her shoulders. Her body feels small and slick and too hot, like she has a fever. She’s shaking, almost imperceptibly. “It’s okay,” he says, and then “You were having a nightmare.” This, it strikes him, is a somewhat stupidly obvious thing to say; it’s not like she didn’t know she was having a nightmare. He wishes he was better at this.  
She nods. She isn’t crying, just shaking a little. He runs his hand through her matted hair and feels her still slightly, her body curling in closer to his.   
He doesn’t ask her what the dream was about. The words linger bitterly in his mouth, equally impossible to swallow or spit out. Gilda exhales heavily, unevenly, her breath warm and damp. 

Isely’s trial is in three weeks. It’s going to be an idiosyncratic one, to say the least. Some miserable, harried, public defender has been saddled with the case and Harvey feels a profound and personal sympathy for her, despite the circumstances. He remembers those days, the endless, impossible, cases. There are worse defendants to have than Isely, but not many.   
Isely herself is, according to Gordon, “obviously one hundred percent guilty, visibly one hundred percent unrepentant.” She’s being held in solitary confinement, a specially constructed sealed chamber, designed with technical assistance from Wayne Industries. Harvey sees a picture of her once, on the news, before Gilda changes the channel. Isely doesn’t look remotely human anymore. Her eyes are mostly pupil, the whites green and shiny as jade, and her hair is like a great carnivorous crimson flower. There’s also a bruise on her jaw and a gash by her hairline; the Bat did a real number on her, by all accounts. Her blood is dark green.   
Harv stirs from the soft black place he’s been lurking when he sees her face. They’d let us into the prison if we asked, he says. Break in, fuck her bloody, cut her head off. Hell, maybe she’ll regrow it. Plants can do that. Could be good for days.   
Harvey ignores him. He goes to HBO.   
Faggot, Harv says.   
Harvey ignores that too.   
The interview with the police is sort of a haze. A pretty Hispanic detective with a sweet smile takes his statement, and Harvey tries to dig his way through the ragged, hallucinatory, remnants of that evening. He mentions Rosaceae vularis and is at a total loss when the detective asks him how to spell it. She ends up having to look it up on her phone, and snorts at the results.  
“What?” Harvey asks curiously.   
She shows him the screen. The first result is an academic paper written by a Dr. Pamela Isely, dating to two years ago. Harvey laughs at that, despite himself.   
The interview comes to a close. “I just wanted to say,” the detective says, closing her bag, “y’know, I really appreciate all the work you’ve done. We all did, here. A lot of the time it feels like you make the arrests and they don’t really mean anything, but with you—I mean, it’s just nice to feel like there’s somebody on our side.”  
Harvey smiles at her, feeling a little bit more like himself, or at least like the person he is on TV. “Thank you, Detective,” he says, managing to summon a little of the sleek calm that protects him from the cameras. “Always good to hear.”  
“Yeah, of course,’ she says. She really does have a very sweet smile.   
Bruce has halted work on the hospital and launched an inquiry into who was responsible for the survey. Another survey is apparently in the works. Isely has been successful in at least one respect; she got everybody to pay attention to the island and its botanical significance. That’s good, Harvey supposes.   
Bruce has not made contact since Harvey got out of the hospital. No calls. No emails. Harvey tries to ignore this fact, which is complicated by the way that it seems to sit on his heart like some sort of miserable stone gargoyle, impossibly heavy and brutal. He tells himself to get over it. He’s had plenty of time to anticipate this, and Bruce is not the first friend he’s ever lost. It won’t feel like this forever.   
He works. Working always helps. He submerges himself in the numb anonymous drone of business as usual, the words, the facts, the endless emails and memos and case briefs. There’s always more work. The work is the one dependable thing, endless and inevitable.   
Gilda used to say that he had set himself an insurmountable task by trying to fix a world that was by its fundamental nature broken. She’s never quite grasped that the endlessness of the work is one of the best things about it. To never be finished, and therefore to always be necessary. To always be needed. To never be superfluous.   
Bruce had gotten it. Bruce had understood, without having to be told. But Bruce had always been good at things like that. He always understood how important it was to be useful.   
He’s doing okay. He can eat pretty much everything now, and he’s stopped blacking out. Harv is still subdued. He’s gotten very good at fending Gilda off whenever she approaches a subject with the potential for combustibility. He’s managing about as well as he can. But sometimes he’ll be drinking coffee or checking the time and a little voice in his head will say Bruce is gone, and he’ll feel a black emptiness move over the face of his soul, like a storm front reflected on the water. 

He goes into Gilda’s study to ask her if she bought coriander and she isn’t there. Instead, there’s a bust sitting in the middle of the room. This in itself is not unusual; Gilda is usually working on multiple sculptures at once and one of them is generally a bust. But there’s something different about this one, something that makes Harvey come fully into the room to get a better look.   
It’s the head of a woman, done in clay, smooth and pale as grey pearl. She’s of an indeterminate age; her head is tilted back and long coils of clay hair spill over her shoulders, caught somehow in one perfect moment of weightless motion. Her eyes are closed, but her mouth is open, and a snake is crawling out, over her lips and jaw and down onto her throat like some grotesque, distended, tongue. He leans down and he can see the snake’s head pressed against the hollow of her throat—its wise, sinister, eyes, the fine lacework of its scales. The woman’s face is blasted and brilliant, lit up with some expression between holy awe and ecstasy. Her mouth is a black abscess, the snake pouring out of it, almost liquid.   
It’s a striking piece, and an unsettling one. Harvey doesn’t like it. It’s not the sort of thing Gilda usually makes. She likes to do character studies, detailed, intense, depictions of particular people, done with obsessive care. This one is different. The woman’s face is beautiful, but indistinct somehow, blurred by the strange power of her expression and the shock of the snake. There is something about it that is mythical, archetypal, obscene.   
He stares at it for a long moment, feeling his stomach turn over inside him. This seems significant in a way he neither likes nor fully understands. There is something in the carved woman’s face that he recognizes, that he feels like an echo in his mind, and this realization is not pleasant.   
Break it, Harv says.   
Harvey leaves, and shuts the door behind him. 

“This should not have happened,” Bruce says. “By all accounts, this was a failure in oversight, one for which I am prepared to take full responsibility. I believed in the integrity of my employees; I was mistaken. Nevertheless, charges are being brought against those responsible, and I expect that, as usual, the work of the Gotham justice department will be swift and fair.”  
Someone on the telecast audibly laughs. Harvey, sitting at his desk, snorts. Bruce is wearing a grey suit and looks like some sort of professional male model with a past as a contract killer. The fan of microphones surrounds him like a thornbush.   
“What are the new plans for the build site?” asks a crisp voice, which Harvey distantly recognizes as belonging to Vicki Vale.   
“The island will be cleaned up and preserved, with assistance from members of the Gotham University Department of Botany. The build itself will continue as soon as a new site can be found.”  
“What are your thoughts on Pamela Isely, and her attempt on Harvey Dent’s life?”  
Bruce’s face does not change in any way that Harvey can detect. “Dr. Isely is clearly a troubled woman, and I hope she’ll receive the assistance she needs. Harvey is a friend of mine. I was of course very upset to hear that he had been hospitalized, but I’m told he’s recovering well. And I think that brings this conference to an end. No more questions, thank you.”  
Harvey turns the TV off. It occurs to him that Bruce does not look well. His face is sunken and his eyes are blank. 

The trial is in a week. Harvey goes to visit his father. It’s a clear day, the sky brilliant with sunlight, and Harvey doesn’t realize that his hands are shaking until he gets into the car. He sits there holding the steering wheel until they stop. It’s a sign of weakness. He can’t afford that. He turns the radio on and listens to the meaningless wash of music and tries not to think about anything. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this now.   
His father looks old, and tired, which is nothing new. Every time Harvey sees him he seems more like a stranger who happens to share some of his facial features. His lips are cracked, his eyes pale and hazy. He lies in the starched bed, thin and fragile as a dead tree.   
“I hope you brought me some new tapes,” he says, as Harvey enters the room. “The last ones were garbage.”   
This is how most of their conversations start. Harvey wordlessly digs in his briefcase and finds the Ziploc bag with the tapes in it. The old man’s eyesight has been going for over a year. These days all he does is listen to the TV and books on tape, using an honest-to-God tape player, because he doesn’t know how an iPod works and says he’s too old to learn. Harvey buys him the tapes off eBay.   
“What are they this time?” his father asks.   
“I don’t know. There’s a Dennis Lehane one,” Harvey says. He puts the bag on the foot of the bed and sits down in the stiff little toothpick chair next to it. His father turns his head in Harvey’s direction, the dull eyes almost looking at him.   
“Dennis Lehane is a talentless piece of shit,” he says. “I wanted Michael Crichton. I swear to God I told you that last time.”  
Last time it had been James Ellroy who had been a talentless piece of shit, and Dennis Lehane who had been the requested replacement. “Yeah,” Harvey says. “Sorry.”  
His father waves a skeletal hand in the air in a gesture that Harvey cannot precisely interpret, but which is still close enough to Harvey’s face to make him lean back a little in his chair. For a moment his mind goes white and he can’t think of anything at all to say.   
If he tries to touch us, Harv hisses, I’ll break every fucking bone in his hand.   
A measure of clarity returns with this. Harvey turns his head to look out the window, at the stained-glass sky, the gauzy green trees. This is always a little easier when he doesn’t have to look directly at him.   
“How you doing, Dad?” he asks.   
“Old,” his father says. “Dying. Pretty much the same as last time. And I need more water.” The wasted hand lifts to grope for the call button.   
“I can get it,” Harvey says automatically. Always safer to pre-empt requests.   
“No, you stay put. With what I’m paying these people, they should be able to get me a goddamn glass of water.”  
What I’m paying these people, Harvey does not say. There’s no real point. These are the kinds of details his father inevitably forgets. And besides, it doesn’t really matter.   
A plump blonde girl comes in, wearing one of the anodyne uniforms the home provides its employees. His father calls her honey and she smiles at him with that particular tolerant tenderness that is reserved by young female careworkers for harmlessly dirty old men (this is a particular dynamic with which Harvey wishes he was not so familiar). She leaves, and there’s a moment of absence during which both Harvey and his father are silent, and then she comes back with a flimsy plastic cup half full of water.   
“You’re a ministering angel,” his father says, carefully folding his fingers around the cup as she puts it into his hand.  
“Anything for you,” the girl replies. She shoots Harvey a warm, knowing, look. “Don’t wear him out, now.”  
“You’re the only one I want doing that,” his father says to her, with a big sprawling grin. The girl laughs and leaves. His father takes a sip of water, both hands wrapped around the cup, like a child. Harvey returns his gaze to the window. His hands are shaking again.   
“The TV said that some woman tried to poison you or something,” his father says after a moment.   
Harvey glances back at him involuntarily. The old man is still holding the cup, staring at nothing in particular. His nails are clipped brutally short, exposing sore red crescents of inflamed skin. Harvey considers this for a second, trying to calculate the reply that has the least likelihood of blowing up in his face. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I was in the hospital.” It seems noncommittal enough.   
“Because of a plant, they said.”  
“That was it. She’s a scientist. Was, I guess.”  
“She must have cared a hell of a lot about plants.”   
Harvey idly considers the idea of trying to explain Dr. Isely’s rather unique relationship with the horticultural world. The prospect is almost funny. “She does,” he says.   
“Stupid thing to do,” his father says. “She should have known you wouldn’t go down that easy.”  
Harvey looks at him. A half-smile touches his father’s face, like a shadow. Harvey’s stomach pulls nauseously inwards and he looks away, a sweet warmth curling up his spine. He doesn’t understand what he’s feeling. He wishes that it didn’t feel as good as it does.   
Like a dog after scraps, Harv says. Fucking pathetic.   
The old man can usually manage about ten minutes of talking before he gets tired, and today it goes fairly well. Harvey listens to stories he’s heard before and reads off a list of the tapes in the bag. He stays quiet, agreeable, saying yes often and no almost never. It doesn’t always work. This time it does. His father spontaneously remembers that Gilda exists and asks after her health. This sometimes happens and it’s vaguely funny every time, given the fact that if it were legal Gilda would unquestionably have caved his father’s skull in with a rock by now.   
Gilda doesn’t know he’s there, he realizes. He didn’t tell her. Maybe that’s a good thing.   
He imagines asking his father about the ridiculous situation he seems to have created for himself. Isn’t that supposed to be a thing, that you ask your father for advice in difficult life situations? Hey Dad, just wondering, but do you think it’s possible to be romantically in love with two people at once? Is it possible to love two people in ways that are the same but also different, especially since one of them is female and one of them is, well, really not? What are your feelings on this issue?   
It is not a struggle to imagine the response he would get to that. Even when he’s not physically in the same room as his father, he carries around a very accurate copy of his voice tucked into the back of his head, keeping up a running commentary on his thoughts. It alway has an opinion and a lot of the time it’s as loud as Harv. Sometimes louder. Easier to ignore, though.  
His father gets tired. The pale eyes sag, fall closed. His face goes slack. Harvey watches him, watches the grey threads of spittle drape from his wrinkled lips.  
Without really meaning to, Harvey says “Did you ever really love Mom?”  
His father’s eyes open. He stares vacantly at the ceiling for a moment, and then he rolls his head over to look in Harvey’s direction. “What the hell kind of question is that?”  
It seems like a reasonable enough thing to ask to Harvey. His parents sure as shit hadn’t loved each other by the end. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was just thinking about it.”   
This is a lie. He hadn’t been thinking about it. He doesn’t know why he said that. He doesn’t really know why he’s asking this in the first place; it’s a mystery he’s lived with pretty peacefully for the past twenty years.   
There’s a pause. His father’s face is vacant, unreadable, like he’s already asleep.   
“Yes,” he says finally. His voice is a ghost voice; impassive and distant. “I did. I loved her for a long, long, time.”  
Everything he says is a lie, Harv whispers.   
A bird chirps outside the window, a fluid ribbon of atonal music. His father’s eyes close again, hollow and bruised.   
On the way home, Harvey switches, for the first time in a while. A horn screams at an intersection, and the world descends into a whirl of dark chaos. When Harvey opens his eyes again he’s halfway back to the hospital. He has to pull into a driveway for a moment until the manic buzzing in his head stops and he can drive home again.   
You would have thanked me, Harv says.   
“Fuck you,” Harvey snaps, and the sharp crack of his own anger shocks him. He hasn’t snapped at Harv like that for years. It’s useless, stupid. Harv cannot be hurt, not with words or blows or anything else that Harvey has at his disposal. He is, fundamentally, untouchable.   
He gets home. Gilda is gone again. It seems like she’s gone a lot these days. Harvey goes into the bedroom and looks around, taking stock of things. The green chenille bedspread that always slides off. The picture of Gilda’s parents on the wall. The stack of books on the desk, read and unread. His clothes draped over the back of the chair; Gilda’s clothes in a neat heap on the floor by the closet. The light is delicate, silky, strange, like a very detailed dream.   
Harvey gets down on his knees beside the bed. He feels very aware of his body, of the marks on his body that have been there his entire life, like a map of violence. Or a brand of ownership. His body has never belonged to him, at least not fully. There’s always someone else hurting it or grabbing it or leaving marks on it or making it do things he doesn’t want it to do. And he never gets to say stop, no, don’t, I don’t want this. It wasn’t an option when he was a kid and the controlling force was outside his body, and it still isn’t now, when it’s inside him.   
In his mind he sees his father’s withered face, pale and thin as an old scar, saying I did, I loved her with no feeling in it at all.   
His knees are starting to hurt. He looks up at the window, and the quicksilver light. What is he doing down here?  
God, he thinks, because that’s usually the reason for being on his knees, as far as he can figure out. God. Please don’t let me end up like him.   
He can’t think of anything else to say. After a moment, he stands up and goes to make dinner.


	3. Part 3

It all comes to a head much more quickly than he anticipates. It’s the next night, and he’s pouring himself a cup of coffee and not really thinking about anything, when the mug tips over the edge of the counter and explodes against the floor in a supernova of porcelain fragments. Harvey stares down at the mess on the floor, the coffee leaving little sepia-stain dots on his socks, and observes that his heartbeat its still regular, he is still fully occupying his own body. This is good. Loud noises are the sort of thing that Harv tends to use to get some traction in his mind.   
Gilda comes running into the room, her hair wild, saying “What is it? What happened?” Her face is distorted, strained and ugly with panic.   
“It’s okay,” Harvey says. “I just dropped the mug. It’s fine.”  
“Oh,” Gilda says breathlessly. “Are you okay?”  
“Yeah, I’m fine. It didn’t hurt me.” Harvey gets down on his knees and starts to sweep the porcelain shards into a little heap with the side of his hand. Smaller pieces glitter against the tile like diamond dust, unwilling to be moved. He’ll need to get a broom.   
A rustle of cloth and a wash of body heat and Gilda is kneeling opposite him with a paper towel, dragging it through the murky puddle of coffee. She doesn’t look at him. She’s wearing jeans and a sweater that’s too big for her, no makeup, no jewelry. He feels a sudden and surprisingly intense pulse of erotic interest, which makes it all the more surreal when she lets the paper towel fall out of her hand, leans back on her heels, and says “Okay, I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore. We have to talk.”  
“What?” Harvey asks stupidly, trying to dig past the fog of disorientation and arousal.   
Gilda’s mouth is a hard slash, cold and serious as a paper cut. “You know what I thought?” she says. “When I heard the crash? I thought, oh, he’s dead, again. And this time he’s not going to come back. And I thought that you were dead and I had never gotten to actually understand any of it, because I was a coward and you were too and so we just never talked about it at all. And that is a shitty way to live, Harvey. It doesn’t make anything better.”  
“Oh,” Harvey says. He feels his heart stammer like a nervous child and then stop altogether. A dull white buzz floods his skull.   
“Yeah, oh,” Gilda says coldly. “So we’re doing this. We’re doing this right now.”  
The buzzing is almost deafening, but Harvey gathers all of his will inside him like a fist. This can’t happen. If this happens, it’s all over. “Can I at least finish cleaning up the mug?”  
“No,” Gilda says. “No, you can’t. I know you, Harvey. You’ll clean up the mug and you’ll pretend to answer some of my questions and then you’ll find something else to talk about and I am just not going to do that anymore. It’s not fair. And you know it’s not fair.”  
She’s right about that, of course, as she always is. Harvey looks down at his hands and observes a bright glossy bead of blood on the tip of his left index finger. He must have cut himself on the broken china. It doesn’t hurt at all.  
“It’s really not that important,” he hears himself say. “I thought I was dying. I was high as a kite. I probably did a lot of things.”  
“Don’t fucking do that,” Gilda says furiously. “Not with me. Not now. It was important, okay? It mattered, and that’s why you don’t want to talk about it. But we have to.”  
Harvey stands up, rubbing his hand on his pants. He doesn’t look at her. It makes things easier with his dad; maybe it’ll work here too. “Why?” he says. “Why do we have to talk about this? We’ve been doing okay not talking about it.”  
“No, we have not been doing okay,” Gilda says. He hears her stand. “These past few weeks it’s like you’ve been playing some sort of game with me, making sure I don’t ask the questions you don’t want me to ask. Making sure I stay within acceptable parameters. And you know something? It hasn’t just been the past few weeks. It’s sort of always been like this, hasn’t it? The things that are okay to talk about and the things that aren’t. And I’ve lived with that, because I love you, but I don’t want to have play games with my damn husband, Harvey. That’s not what this is supposed to be like.”  
Harvey can feel every beat of his heart, like steel nails being punched in between his ribs. The buzzing gets louder, multi-dimensional, a howling chorus of ghost voices in his head. The glass wall and the ice and all the other stupid metaphors that don’t really convey the importance of the thing that is breaking now, around him and inside him.   
“Bruce was there,” Gilda says. Her voice is softer, almost hushed. “You remember that.”  
“Yeah,” Harvey says dully.   
“You said—” Gilda exhales sharply. “You said you loved him. Both of us. You called us the loves of your life.”  
“I remember what I said,” Harvey replies, and then, with one last fatalistic stab of false carelessness, “I mean, the guy’s my best friend, right? I’m not allowed to say I love my best friend? That’s some toxic masculinity bullshit.”  
“It wasn’t like that,” Gilda said quietly. “You didn’t say it like that. You say it the way you say it to me.”  
Harvey’s throat locks up. He stares at the blind white surface of the refrigerator. Stupidly, pointlessly, his mind vomits up the refrigerator they had in the kitchen when he was a kid, and how he used to stare at that one too, waiting for the hurting thing to stop, or at least waiting until he couldn’t see anymore.   
“It’s not just Bruce,” Gilda says. Her voice is even. “I talked to the nurse. The one you—I don’t know, the one you attacked. Convinced her not to press charges. And she said that the person who attacked her wasn’t you. That he had your body, but he walked differently, talked differently. And that he kept talking about some other person. Saying I won’t let you hurt him, stuff like that.”  
Harvey can see his reflection in the glossy white of the refrigerator, a pale smudge of color, like a shadow or a stain. He considers saying it was the drugs, it was a side effect, but doesn’t. Not much point in doing that anymore. Denials are no longer of any use.   
“And I’ve been thinking,” Gilda says, still quiet, still level, “that this isn’t a new thing either. Is it? I’ve known you for a long time. I talk to you everyday, and I think I can say by now that it’s not always you I’m talking to. Or not entirely, at least. You go out sometimes, and you don’t tell me where you’ve been. And sometimes you’re just…different. I don’t know. You do things, or you say things, and I don’t know if you remember them, but I do. I remember a lot more than you think I do.”  
The reflection in the refrigerator blurs into nothing. Harvey feels his heart break, with perfect, dazzling clarity, like a twig snapping. All the details of this moment rush in on him, savage and unstoppable, this moment where everything is ending; the blood on his hand, the sharp tang of coffee, the buttery sunlight. Something warm brushes his shoulder and he flinches without meaning to before looking down and seeing the slender fingers, the last remnants of pale green nail polish.  
“I love you, Harvey,” Gilda says. Her voice is much closer to his ear now, and he can hear the faint tremble in it that wasn’t audible before. “I want to know you. All of you. And I want to…I want to know whoever he is too.”  
Her touch burns into his shoulder, sudden and cruel as a brand. Harvey pulls away. “I can’t talk about this,” he says. His voice sounds gutted. Dead.   
Gilda is facing him now, and he sees her face twist, realizes that she’s on the edge of tears, and probably has been all this time. “Why not?” she demands.   
“Because if we talk about it, this is over, alright?” Harvey says. He’s too tired. He’s run out of lies. “If we talk about it, that’s it for us. This marriage, everything. It’s over. Do you understand that?”  
“Bullshit,” Gilda says immediately. “If not talking about it couldn’t sink us, talking about it definitely won’t.”  
Harvey laughs, and it’s a horrible noise, like the rattle of broken glass. “You have no idea what you’re asking for,” he says. “You have no idea how bad this can get. You think you want to know me, but if I actually tell you, you won’t want to know me anymore.”  
“You’re my husband,” Gilda says quietly. “Why the hell would I ever not want to know you?”  
“Because it’s ugly,” Harvey says. He can hear the lifelessness in his voice, the hollowness. “It’s really fucking bad, okay? However bad you think it is, it’s worse. There’s a reason I’ve never talked about this.”  
“If it’s actually that awful, don’t I deserve to know?” Gilda demands.   
“Yeah,” Harvey says emptily. “Yeah, of course you deserve to know.”  
There’s a boiling knot of tears caught in his throat, burning against every breath. Its presence is unexpected; he had sort of hoped he was past tears at this point. He sinks incisors into the inside of his lip and tastes the bright gauzy billow of blood that flowers in his mouth. He’s not going to cry. He’s not going to do that to Gilda, not now.   
Gilda is staring at him intently, her dark eyes gone thin and hard. He has the feeling of being unraveled, like a piece of cloth. Gilda’s mouth pulls inwards, and then she sort of nods to herself.   
“Do you remember when Stacey Lynch died?” she says.   
“Yes,” Harvey replies, to exhausted to wonder what this has to do with anything.   
“Yeah.” Gilda’s gaze stays on his face, unblinking, cold as iron. “I was at work when I saw the newspaper. And I didn’t go home straight away. First I went to a pawn shop and asked the owner if he would sell me a handgun.”  
A tiny flare of shock stirs in Harvey’s brain. “What?” he asks weakly. “Why?”  
“To kill them,” Gilda replies flatly. “The rapists. I knew their names, and I knew that if I looked through your files I could find where they lived. I figured I would kill them, dump the gun in the river, act shocked when you heard about it. It wouldn’t be hard.”  
“Did you do it?” Harvey asks.   
“No. It turned out I picked the one law-abiding pawn shop in Gotham and the owner wanted to see a gun license. By the time I left the shop I had managed to talk myself out of it. But I wanted to. I really, really, wanted to. I still do. Sometimes I dream about it, and then I’ll wake up and think, they’re still out there. I could still do it.”  
“Why don’t you?” Harvey asks, a bleak fascination curling in his stomach like a snake. “How do you keep stopping yourself?”  
Gilda shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I have no idea what keeps me from doing it for real. Whatever it is, I have a feeling it’s a limited resource, and one day or another it may run out.”  
“Why are you telling me this?” Harvey whispers.   
“Because I want you to know that you’re not the only person with ugly stuff inside them.” Gilda meets his eyes. “You’re not alone. You never have been. And you’re not the only one in the world with problems.”  
For a brief moment, a delirious rush of hope bubbles up inside Harvey, and he almost opens his mouth to tell her. He can feel the words inside him, in the same place that they’ve always been waiting, and he only barely manages to bite them back. It’s not the same. It just isn’t. All of Gilda’s bravery and honesty and trust are not enough to make it the same. “Thank you for telling me,” he says. “But I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”  
A desperate spasm of bitterness crosses Gilda’s face. Harvey feels his heart begin to turn on itself, consume itself.   
“I just want to know you,” she says. “That isn’t so much to ask, is it?”  
“Gilda, I love you more than anything,” Harvey says, because this, at least, is a part of the truth that he can give her. “But if you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me anymore.”  
Gilda’s face stills, and her eyes grow tight. Her spine is straight as an underline. “Give me some credit,” she says. “At least believe that I know what I want.”  
Harvey stares at her. His mouth is a desert. He can’t think of a single thing to say.   
After a long, airless, moment, Gilda turns and leaves the room. Her footsteps fade down the corridor, and then a door creaks and shuts. Her absence lingers in the kitchen, as significant as her presence, like a phantom limb. Harvey becomes aware that he hasn’t been breathing and drags in a painful gulp of air.   
In the garage, the car starts up with a dim rattle, a wet cough of exhaust. Harvey listens to it grind away until the sound ebbs to nothing and she is gone.  
He gets a broom and some paper towels and goes to work cleaning up the spill. 

 

Gilda does not come back that night or the next morning, and the thing that surprises Harvey most is how calm he feels about it. He doesn’t switch or have a panic attack or even experience any significant emotion at all. The world recedes to a comfortable distance, the way it does under anesthesia. Time swims delicately past, moments bleeding into hours.   
He cleans up the spill and gets his work out of the briefcase. He feels nothing. A peaceful grey vacancy expands in his chest like an empty cathedral. He is able to recognize this as the temporary shock reaction it probably is, but he decides to take advantage of it while it lasts. The house is silent. For about an hour he becomes completely convinced that nothing actually exists beyond the room he is in, that the world has been swallowed by a white void, but then a car horn goes off and he realizes that this probably is not true.   
He isn’t hungry and he isn’t tired, so he doesn’t eat or sleep. He gets his work done and then decides to read Isely’s paper on Rosaceae vularis. He feels like he should know more about the thing that almost killed him and may yet end up destroying his life. He starts reading at ten PM and doesn’t finish until dawn. It’s very long, and he keeps losing focus and staring at nothing for minutes-long gaps of meaningless brain static. Additionally, Isely’s prose is something less than scintillating. Brilliant, gorgeous, plant-hybrid eco-terrorist; maybe there had to be something about her that was boring. She makes the mistake of assuming that the most complex and technical details of plant structure will be as fascinating to her audience as they clearly are to her, which is almost charming, in a way.   
He finishes the last page and looks out the window at the pale smudged sky, the half-asleep world, and can’t remember any of what he just read. It doesn’t matter. He takes a shower and puts on his suit. Normally this point in his routine is when he would eat a bagel or something, but he still isn’t hungry, so he doesn’t. He goes to work instead. It’s still too early, but that’s never a problem. There’s always more work. He gets in the car and forgets to think for a little while. When he manages to focus again, he’s in the parking lot.   
The rest of the day passes similarly. He floats along on a smooth colorless haze of numbness, losing long stretches of time, watching from a distance as his body enacts its usual pattern of typing, talking, making phone calls. It’s sort of nice, this drifting, witness but not participant to his own life. He wonders if this is what giving up control to Harv full-time would be like.   
Harv himself does not come out at any time, which does not really come as any surprise to Harvey. Harv’s original job was to deal with things, but this is nothing like the situations which he was originally programmed to handle. Harv is good at other things. Fear, pain, anger. Loud, bright, feelings that come in primary colors. He has no talent with complex emotions, and tends to ignore them.   
No one asks how he’s doing, or even looks at him funny. His autopilot system must be very convincing. He goes home at the usual time. When he pulls into the garage, Gilda’s car is there. He sits in his own car for a full five minutes, staring at it, wondering what’s about to happen. He still isn’t feeling anything. His mind is as smooth and impassive as a mirror. Eventually he grabs his briefcase and gets out. If he’s lucky, he can get this whole thing done while he’s still feeling nothing, and postpone the inevitable meltdown.   
He goes into the house. Gilda is in the kitchen; she turns and sees him at the door and smiles. She does not look upset or angry. It’s a smile much like all the other smiles she’s ever given him when he comes home from work. “Hi, honey,” she says.   
“Hi,” Harvey replies. He is pleased to observe that the numbness has survived seeing her. He can detect things happening within him, somewhere beyond the numbness, but they are muted and distant, like the cries of a drowning man, muffled by water. He puts his briefcase down.   
“Come with me,” Gilda says. She turns and goes into the living room. Harvey trails after her, surrendering all control of the situation as he does so. What happens now is entirely in her hands.   
Bruce is sitting on the love seat in the living room, a heap of angles in a tailored black overcoat, slightly and appealingly too large in the way that he is slightly and appealingly too large for every piece of furniture he sits in. Harvey sees him and feels something sharp and sudden flare within him for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. At first it’s just a bright splash of shock at the fundamental fact of Bruce’s presence, but this is quickly followed by a stranger, subtler, thing, an image yanked out of his memory with all of its accompanying emotional impact—the last time the room was like this, Bruce on the couch, Gilda standing in the corner. The night that Bruce had come over to watch Jeopardy and eat soup. The way he had felt then, that weightless feeling.   
“Harvey,” Bruce says stiffly. He is transparently uncomfortable, sitting on the love seat like it’s a bear trap about to snap shut around him. This is hardly a surprise. Bruce is, at heart, a kind person. Rejecting people has never been easy for him.   
Gilda is standing over by the TV, her arms folded. “Is this really happening?” he asks her. He doesn’t know precisely what he means by that; are we doing this right now or is this actually happening in real life. It doesn’t really matter, because Gilda says “Yes,” and that means that this is really happening, and it’s happening now.  
The numbness is melting, slipping away from him like soap in the bath. He goes to sit down on the sofa. Probably better to not be standing for this.   
Bruce’s face is narrow and rigid, armoured. He looks like he’s about to get up and leave at any moment. Gilda on the other hand, seems completely unbothered. There’s a solidity about her, a sleek determination.  
“Okay,” Harvey says hollowly. “What do you want me to do?”  
There is a long, airless, pause. About half of Harvey is expecting Gilda to say I want you to help me move out, go get my books, so a slight shock goes through him when Bruce clears his throat and says “We—uh, Gilda and I agreed that it might be time to talk about what happened in the hospital.”  
“Oh,” Harvey says. “Okay.” His voice sounds very distant to him, like the ringing of far-away church bells. He puts his head down, trying to breathe.   
It’s possible that Gilda thought she was being kind, doing this. Giving him the chance to make a clean end of it. And maybe she’s right. Maybe this is the best way.   
He lifts his head and focuses his gaze somewhere beyond the foggy dark smudge that is Bruce, on the unthreatening blank of the far wall. “I mean, you know, what happened, don’t you?” His voice cracks horribly at the end, like a kid. “You know what it was.”  
“I think so,” Bruce says quietly. “But I’m not—I don’t want to—”  
He breaks off. Harvey glances at him, sees him throw a quick unreadable glance at Gilda, who shrugs loosely in a way that Harvey recognizes. It’s the Harvey is being weird, world without end, shrug. Harvey’s seen it more times than he can remember, more times than he can count.   
It’s the shrug that does it, ultimately. These people have put up with way too much ridiculous bullshit from him over the years. No matter what’s happening inside him, he has to make this as easy for them as he can. That’s the basic principle of all the good he’s ever done, the last and strongest wall that divides him from Harv. No matter how hard it is, no matter what else is happening around you, you have to at least try to do what’s right.   
“Gilda,” he says.   
She looks over at him, her eyes widening.   
“Gilda,” he repeats. “I’ve never loved anyone like I love you. You’re the most important person to me. You know that.”  
“I do,” Gilda says evenly.   
“Okay.” Harvey drags in a deep ragged breath. “Okay. Bruce.”  
Bruce looks at him, and Harvey takes in his masklike face, those bottomless eyes, the same as they were twenty years ago. He observes that Bruce’s hand is wrapped around a fold of his overcoat, the knuckles waxy with tension. Then he makes himself look back up at Bruce’s face.   
“You’re my best friend,” he says. “I mean, you and Gilda. I’ve told you that a lot of times. But it’s not just…”  
He trails off, biting the inside of his lip, waiting for the blood and the crisp clarity of pain. It’s not that he doesn’t know what he has to say; he knows exactly what he has to say, and he knows the simplest way to say it. But he doesn’t want this to be simple, he wants it to be accurate. Now that he has no choice but to say it, he wants to say it right.   
“That night,” he says finally. “When you came over to eat, and you knew that stupid thing about beaver buttholes or whatever it was. And we were all together, the three of us. That—us being together—it made me feel so fucking happy. Not—I don’t know, not more happy than when it’s just me and Gilda, but a different kind of happy. A bigger kind. I felt so full of it. Like a balloon.”  
It’s a dumb thing to say, and he laughs a little. From the outside, he supposes, this whole situation must be kind of funny, although it’s hard to see from where he’s sitting.   
“Anyway,” he says. “Later, when I was in the hospital, and I woke up and you guys were there, and I thought I was dying, it was—the way I wanted to die, I guess. With you guys there. It felt like it was alright I was dying, because you were both there, and that meant I was—I don’t know. Safe, maybe? Loved?”  
He wishes that he could laugh again, to make it seem less serious, but he cannot bring himself to do so. This is pretty fucking serious. Bruce has stopped looking at him, and is now staring at a spot of carpet near his own foot. Harvey doesn’t blame him. This kind of trainwreck is probably not easy to watch.   
Gilda, however, is looking directly at him, with that mercilessly clear, steady, gaze. Harvey looks away.   
“I’m not saying this very well,” he says flatly. “I should probably just get to the point here. I love you. Both of you, and I—I want both of you, and when we’re all together it makes me happier than I’ve ever been. I know it’s not like that for you, and I know it’s selfish and fucked-up and stupid. I’ve always been sort of selfish and fucked-up and stupid.”  
He stares at the floor. He knows he should be looking at them, that they deserve that much, but he is incapable of forcing himself to do so. It’s out now; he said it, it’s done, and without the weight of it on him he feels light and fragile as a dead leaf, like a breeze could pull him apart.  
Bruce makes a weird sort of wet noise and says “Well, you’re right about one thing, at least. You’re definitely pretty stupid.”  
Shock tugs Harvey’s head up. Bruce is still not looking at him, still staring at the floor, but there is a new light in the black tunnels of his eyes, bright and almost feverish. And Gilda, in her corner, is smiling. It’s fine and frail, but it’s a real smile. Harvey feels his heart turn upside down.   
“I don’t understand,” he says, and then, groping for the outline of how this conversation is supposed to go, “I, I know you didn’t want any of this, and I’m sorry to put it all on you, but you asked, and—”  
“Stop.” Bruce puts one big hand over his face and waves the other one indistinctly in Harvey’s direction. “God. Stop apologizing. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”  
Harvey’s thoughts run in crazed circles around his skull, like manic wind-up toys. Gilda is still smiling, gentle and crooked.  
“Wait,” he says, with some difficulty. “What’s happening right now?”  
“He doesn’t get it,” Bruce says to Gilda, his hand dropping from his face, which is now touched by some strange, slippery, sort of expression, half-painful and half-amused.  
“Well, he’s always been slow with these kinds of things,” Gilda informs Bruce, as if Harvey is not still sitting not ten feet away.   
“What the hell,” Harvey says blankly. He can feel his pulse rattling along like a supersonic train, far too fast. “What is—is something going on here? I’m trying to do this right, okay? I don’t want either of you to feel like you have to—”  
He is aware of the precise moment that the truth begins to unfold inside him, like the silent chaos of white moth wings, the scatter of dust in afternoon sunlight. It expands into a great clear prism, something too bright and complex to look at fully, bumping against the edges of his ribcage. His tongue seals up his throat. He feels his heart grow very still, like a hunted animal. All the words that he thought he wanted to say burn to nothing in the new light inside him.   
And, like it was before, all the details of this perfect unchanging moment flood in on him. The sweat drying on the back of his shirt. The faded green of the carpet. The way the air tastes of dust and emptiness.   
“There it is,” Gilda says, her voice broad with satisfaction. Bruce makes that little wet noise again, involuntarily, as if in pain, and then sits back against the sofa.   
“No,” Harvey says, only vaguely paying aware of what’s coming out of his mouth. “No, it’s not—”  
There cannot be that much grace in the world. There never has been before.   
“I’m afraid it is,” Bruce says. His voice is soft, almost apologetic. Harvey looks at him and sees him looking back, his mouth an uneven line, his eyes full of that hot light. He does not know how to identify the thing happening inside him right now, like a massive geological event, tectonic plates sliding and shifting. It feels both very simple and enormously complicated; this clean thing, this wordless thing, this thing that shines like a supernova. It feels like a thousand summer days, a thousand glasses of cool water in terrible heat. It is not gentle. In its enormity, it is almost brutal, and it does not feel like something a human body was meant to contain.   
But he’s feeling it now. It’s happening now.   
“Really?” he asks Bruce, and there’s that crack in his voice, but it doesn’t matter now.   
“Yes,” Bruce says. “Really.”  
Harvey exhales and rubs his hand across his mouth, more for the fundamental physical reassurance that such a gesture provides than for any actual reason. “How long?” he asks.   
“I don’t know,” Bruce replies. “A long time. I’ve never been very good at knowing these kinds of things about myself. But when you were in the hospital, and you said—well, it was the first time I had ever really thought about it, and it occurred to me that the nature of my feelings for you might be somewhat different than I had initially assumed. And that it might have been that way for a while.”  
Harvey nods. He doesn’t really want to—there’s still a part of him that feels that any motion might break this moment like a soap bubble—but he does know exactly what Bruce is talking about.  
“And,” Bruce continues, looking back over at Gilda, “that it might not be isolated to just you.”  
Gilda smiles back at him, and there is something familiar in that smile, its radiance, its rich complexity. It’s the same smile Gilda gave Harvey when they started dating. And it’s like that moment in the kitchen, watching them together, when he looked for a hard seed of bitterness inside him and found nothing but warmth and softness. Now, seeing these two people he loves so much looking at each other like this, with all the gentleness and curiosity of new lovers, he can find no anger in his chest, no grief. Only that endlessly bright, expanding, feeling, opening up into new dimensions.   
“You motherfuckers talked about this,” he says weakly.   
“Well, yeah,” Gilda says. “You made it pretty clear that you weren’t going to do it, so I figured I had to be proactive if anything was going to happen at all. And that involved asking Bruce some questions. He was more cooperative than you.”   
“So you—” Harvey swallows thickly. “You’re okay with this. I mean, you want this.”  
“I think so,” Gilda says softly. “I guess I do care about both of you a hell of a lot, and being with you makes me happy, and it feels good when we’re together. I don’t really—I haven’t thought about this much except in the past twenty-four hours, but I have thought about it, and I think it sounds like a pretty good situation to me. And it doesn’t have to be a whole lot more complicated than that, does it?”  
Harvey leans back. He can feel his heartbeat again, slow, dreamy, syrupy. He breathes in and the air tastes sweet.   
“So this is for real,” he says.   
“It seems that way,” Bruce says quietly.   
Is it possible that the world can be this kind? Was it always like this, and he just didn’t know?  
A car grinds past outside, leaving a bright trail of music in its wake.   
Carefully, Bruce gets to his feet. His gaze is fixed on Harvey’s face. He moves across the room, making almost no sound, and kneels on the floor next to Harvey. It’s very weird to be suddenly looking down at Bruce. Harvey has been looking up at him since the growth spurt hit when they were thirteen.   
“I’d like to try something, if it’s alright,” Bruce murmurs.   
“Yes,” Harvey says instantly, and then shoots an uncertain look at Gilda. “I mean—”  
Gilda laughs. “Hey, I want to see how this works out as much as anyone.”  
Harvey is about to respond to that when he feels the warmth of Bruce’s fingers on his jaw. The skin is rough, patched with callous and scar tissue, but the touch is delicate, almost reverent. Harvey feels all the awareness in his body rush to his face, electric and delirious, and then Bruce leans forward and kisses him and the world fades.   
It isn’t exactly that it’s a spectacular kiss. This is Harvey’s first go at kissing a man, and while it’s not as different from kissing a woman as he’d anticipated, it’s still kind of weird. Bruce has very clearly not shaved in about a day; his mouth is soft but also sort of stiff and big, and Harvey doesn’t really know what to do with that. But all of that is totally irrelevant on some much more important level, because fuck, this is Bruce, this is Bruce’s mouth on his and Bruce’s breath in his lungs and Bruce’s tiny, almost inaudible, noises getting caught between his lips and it feels like the answer to a riddle, like a key in a lock, an axe breaking a frozen lake. The rightness of it illuminates his whole body, leaves him dizzy and flushed with light, even as Bruce bites his lip a little too hard and sort of rubs his tongue against Harvey’s front teeth. H reaches forward and wraps his hand around the back of Bruce’s neck and feels the stretch and pull of muscles there. Some quiet voice in the back of his head says oh, it’s you. And even though he’s known Bruce his whole life, known him longer than basically anyone, it feels like it means something, that recognition.   
Eventually he pulls back, his lips feeling sticky and sore. Bruce’s mouth looks sore too, red and wet, and his pupils are pools of black ink expanding to swallow his irises. The whole picture is so suddenly and sharply erotic that Harvey stops breathing for a moment, unable to do anything but stare at him.   
An inward flicker crosses Bruce’s face and he quickly says “I’m not great at first kisses. I get better at it, I promise.”  
“No,” Harvey says, and puts his hand on Bruce’s knee. “No, buddy, you have completely misinterpreted this situation. It was good. It was really good.”  
“It looked that way,” Gilda says, from next to him. Harvey starts. She grins at him, perching on the couch, her hands draped elegantly over her crossed legs.   
“So you can teleport now?” Harvey demands.  
“I got here the normal way. You two were just distracted.”  
“I actually did notice you,” Bruce offers.   
“Oh, sure. Constant vigilance, or whatever.” Harvey sits back. With Gilda on one side and Bruce on the other, he has that same feeling he had when they were eating dinner together; the safety of them, the solidity. Being a part of something.   
“Okay,” he says. “Now you two.”  
Gilda raises her eyebrows at him, and Harvey becomes distinctly aware that he has just told his wife and his best friend to make out in front of him. He shifts and folds his arms. “This is a democracy, isn’t it? We have to be fair about this.”  
Bruce laughs softly. Bruce actually laughing is a sufficiently rare occurrence that any time it happens it has a quality of the miraculous about it. “I think we can manage that,” he says, looking at Gilda. “Yeah?”  
“Yeah,” Gilda repeats, an insubstantial smile playing over her lips. She slides to the edge of the couch and leans forward; Bruce tilts his face up to hers.   
Harvey watches as their lips brush, cautiously at first, and then with more conviction. Bruce’s eyes flutter closed. Gilda’s remain open. Her fingers tangle in the fine darkness of Bruce’s hair, curling just a bit too savagely, and Harvey does not miss the ragged, exquisite, shiver that moves through Bruce’s body, the way a cat shivers when you scratch it in just the right place. Their mouths slide apart and he sees the slick wet shine of saliva on Gilda’s lips before they move together again, as if pulled by gravity.   
They are so beautiful, and the interplay of their bodies is like a work of art, something so absurdly gorgeous that Harvey almost doesn’t want to look at it. For a moment, a raw red wound pulls open inside him—fuck, they’re so beautiful, they don’t need him at all, he can only make this worse—but it closes by itself before he can even focus on it for too long. Maybe they don’t need him, but here he is anyway, watching this beautiful thing happen. And they know he’s here, and they want him to be here, and they’re doing this at least partially because he asked them to. He’s a part of this, whatever it is.   
He realizes that Harv has not broke in once to offer his opinions since the beginning of this, despite the fact that Harv’s intense and long-standing hatred of Bruce is one of the things that still bothers Harvey the most about him. Maybe Harv is still hiding wherever he went yesterday when Gilda left. Maybe Harv is just as shocked about this turn of events as Harvey is. Whatever the case, Harvey spares a moment to thank God for letting him live in silence, at least for now.   
Gilda and Bruce drift apart, her fingers still lingering in his hair. They gaze at each other with identical expressions of mesmerized hunger, like sleepwalkers. Eventually, Gilda moves her hand from Bruce’s hair and it falls into her lap. Her other hand wraps around the wrist, as if holding it there where it can’t touch anyone. Her cheeks are touched with a lovely intoxicated shade of pink.   
It occurs to Harvey that Bruce kissing Gilda was probably less awkward than Bruce kissing him, since Bruce is generally used to kissing women and Gilda is generally used to kissing men. This realization doesn’t trouble him very much. Bruce said he would get better with practice, and Harvey fully intends to hold him to that.   
“Okay,” Gilda says after a moment. She touches her face, as if taking stock of the color in her cheeks. "That was nice.” She pauses for a moment, and then laughs helplessly, propping her forehead against the heel of her hand. Harvey pats her shoulder comfortingly, having very recently been stranded in a similar state of post-kiss idiocy.   
Bruce runs the tip of one finger over his bottom lip, which is now looking somewhat hard-used. “I…will want to do that again sometime,” he says to Gilda.   
“No problem,” Gilda says faintly. She rolls her head back and laughs again, distractedly. “God.”  
Then she looks at Harvey and raises her eyebrows. “Shall we?”  
It seems almost superfluous, but it is the logical next step. The final permutation of tongues and teeth. Harvey holds his hand out, and Gilda takes it. It happens the same way it has for six years; the silky slide of lips, her butterfly breath, the familiar tenderness of it, kind and clean as sunlight. It’s easy, kissing Gilda. It always has been. She tastes the same way she always has, and she lets out the same little sigh as always when they pull apart. Her hand stays in his, like a keepsake. On instinct, Harvey holds out his other hand to Bruce, and Bruce takes it.   
“So we’re doing this,” Harvey says, after a moment.   
“Looks that way,” Bruce agrees serenely.   
“Okay. But, like, we shouldn’t do this, right? We’re all aware of that?”  
“Seriously?” Gilda says, staring at him.   
“Well, it’s fine for you, you’re a bohemian artist type. You’re supposed to be depraved. But Bruce, you’re the head of Wayne Industries. Christ, I’m the fucking DA.” Harvey feels his fingers curling too tightly, like barbed wire. “If we—if this happens, and it ever gets out—”  
“It won’t,” Bruce says smoothly.   
Harvey grins thinly. “You cannot promise that.”  
“I’ve had tabloids after me since I was fifteen. I’ve learned a few tricks.” Bruce’s hands press into the back of Harvey’s hand, solid and meaningful. Harvey looks down and sees that pale web of scars across the knuckles he’s always wanted to touch. He can touch them now, he realizes. He’s allowed. Cautiously, he runs his thumb across them, feeling the ripple and crease of remade skin.   
“Listen,” Bruce says. His voice is steady, unhurried. “I’m not normally the person to take risks. Not with things like this, I mean. Getting attached to people. You know that.”  
Harvey nods wordlessly. Bruce has maybe three actual friends, and two of them are in this room right now. His emotional defenses are a hundred feet tall and armed with anti-siege weapons; Harvey has frequently reflected that he was very lucky to meet Bruce at the moment immediately before those walls went up for good.   
“Okay.” Bruce looks down, intently studying the hollow of his own wrist, as if he has a speech written there. “I’m not good at stuff like this. I’m…aware of that tendency in myself. But still, even knowing all the risks and all the ways this could go bad, I still want to do it. And I have to believe that’s significant somehow. If nothing else, it means I really, really, want it.”  
“Well,” Harvey says sourly, “that’s a very logical theory to back up an absurd decision.” He looks at Gilda. “And what are your thoughts on this?”  
She shrugs. “It definitely has the potential to be a total catastrophe. We’d be stupid to do it. But we’d be pretty stupid not to do it, too.”  
“I’m outnumbered,” Harvey says, somewhat desperately.   
“Get used to it,” Bruce replies.   
And for half a second, that desperate, electric, hope surges in Harvey’s chest like a white flame. The idea that maybe this is actually possible. Maybe he can really have this, and maybe it really will be good, and not just a set up for some farther fall, some ultimate calamity. That hope hangs there in the center of his chest for a moment, weightless and burning and pure. And then he remembers the other person who will by necessity be involved in this relationship, and that fierce little light plummets into the miserable mealy darkness at the pit of his stomach.   
“What is it?” Bruce says softly. Harvey looks down and sees the almost imperceptible fold of concern between his eyebrows. All these years of working on his mask and Bruce still immediately knows when something’s wrong with him. Side effects of knowing someone for too long.   
He could just tell them. He could, for once in his goddamn life, be honest about this. They wouldn’t spill it to the press or anything. The worst thing they could realistically do. And maybe they wouldn’t even do that. Maybe it’s possible, somehow, that they could stay. He never would have said so fifteen minutes ago, but a lot has happened in fifteen minutes. Maybe, in this new world so full of unexpected grace, he can say this and it won’t destroy him.   
“Harvey?” Gilda says. Her soft fingers dig into his palm.   
He looks at her, her wide brown eyes, her mouth bruised with kisses, and realizes that if he doesn’t tell this to them now, he will never tell anyone. And then it’ll just be him and Harv in the dark, the way it used to be.   
“I have to tell you something,” he says. The words feel sticky, bitter. They don’t want to come out.   
Gilda’s face stills. She knows, of course. Bruce, blissfully ignorant, looks at him with that same mild concern. Harvey tries to dig through the terrible confusion of thoughts in his head to find the right way to say this. It matters less now than it did with his first confession. No matter how he spins it, this one is going to be ugly. He decides to start at the beginning.   
“You know all the shit that happened when I was a kid,” he says. “All the stuff my dad did.”  
“Yeah,” Gilda says, a shadow twisting her face. Bruce nods. His face does not change, but his hand tightens around Harvey’s.   
“Okay,” Harvey says. “Okay.” He takes a deep breath. His throat feels like it’s lined with broken glass. “So when I was—God, I don’t even remember. Really little. Too little. Even then I knew that there were certain things I wasn’t allowed to feel. Like, if my dad even guessed that I was angry at him, he would lose his goddamn mind. So every time I got angry, or scared, or really sad, I would sort of take that feeling and put it somewhere in the back of my head where it didn’t bother me. And it worked really well, for a while. I think that’s how it started.”  
Gilda is staring at him in plain and utter confusion, but there’s a look on Bruce’s face that Harvey doesn’t quite understand. A recognition, almost. Well, if anyone was going to get this part of the story, it was always going to be Bruce. Harvey’s never had any illusions about that.   
“A little while after that,” he continues, “this weird thing started happening. When he was—when my dad was, y’know, hurting me, I started getting this feeling that it wasn’t really happening to me. It looked like me, and it sounded like me, and it was my body, but I wasn’t really there. I was…outside, somewhere. And when it was over I could come back. And all that was great at first. I got really good at it, at going away. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember the things that happened. Which struck me as a pretty decent deal.” His mouth is dry, but he swallows anyway. “Then I started hearing this voice in my head.”  
The confusion immediately clears away from Gilda’s face. She knows where this is going. Harvey looks away, biting back the dizzying surge of nausea that climbs in his chest.   
“It started out pretty easy to handle,” he says. “It would just say the things that I wouldn’t let myself say. When my dad said something stupid, it would say that’s stupid. This isn’t fair, this shouldn’t be happening. Stuff like that. But then it started telling me to do things. Not even for any reason. Just to break stuff, or hit kids at school. These—random, pointless, violent things. And…well, you know where this is going. I started to get the feeling that maybe it wasn’t my voice. That it was someone else talking to me.”  
He puts his head down. He wants to pull away from Bruce and Gilda, to stop touching them. It takes enormous effort to keep his hands in theirs.   
“He said his name was Harv,” he continues dully. “He said that when I went out of my body during the bad stuff, he was the one who took over. He went through all that so I didn’t have to. And he sort of swallowed all the thoughts and feelings I wouldn’t let myself have. His job was to absorb all the really bad shit, and I guess he gave a bunch of really bad shit back in return.”  
Back then Harv’s voice had been hazy, indistinct. He’d gained character over the years. When it started, he hadn’t been much more than an amorphous mass of pain.   
“He didn’t like me very much,” he says. “Never has. He thinks I’m weak and stupid. He started—his big thing was that he wanted me to kill my dad, because then things would be better. He could never understand why I didn’t want to. It was pretty bad for a couple of years. I lost a lot of time. I had to sort of train myself to ignore him, to keep from switching over. And it got better when I went to college, obviously. Usually the way it works is that the better things are for me, the less he’s around. But he’s always sort of around.”  
Bruce is looking at him, his eyes big and wide, but his mouth isn’t hanging open and he isn’t gasping in surprise and he hasn’t let go of Harvey’s hand.   
“You seem less surprised than I expected,” Harvey says.   
“Well,” Bruce says. He blinks owlishly, swallows, and looks away. “I did always know that there was something happening with you. I can’t say that I ever anticipated it being this, but I knew it was something.”  
Harvey allows himself to exhale, feeling the iron knot in his stomach loosen slightly.   
“This whole time,” Gilda says.   
Her voice is flat. Harvey turns to look at her and the knot instantly grips tight again, twisting his guts. A darkness sprawls across Gilda’s faec, broad and unkind as a scar. Her hand in his feels cold and stiff as that of a corpse.   
“I’m sorry,” he says instantly. It sounds so utterly insufficient, almost meaningless.   
“This whole time,” Gilda says again. She isn’t quite looking at him. Her eyes are fixed on something beyond his head.   
Harvey hesitates. Worlds crowd up and clog in his throat. “I mean,” he says. “You kind of knew already, didn’t you? You said you did.”  
“I guessed,” Gilda says. “Guessing is one thing. Finding out that your husband has been lying to you for six years is quite another.”  
Harvey’s throat closes. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry, Gilda.”  
“Yeah,” Gilda says. “I know you are.”  
She pulls her hand out of his grasp, gets up, and goes over to the window. She stands there, looking out at the pale wash of the backyard. Silhouetted in the light, her face is still and cold, like some ascetic saint, detached from the world.   
“Gilda,” Bruce says cautiously.   
Gilda shakes her head sharply. “Don’t,” she says. “This isn’t—I’ll get over this eventually, okay? I just need some time to process.”   
Bruce glances at Harvey, and Harvey avoids his gaze. He doesn’t get to talk here. Not yet, anyway.   
Abruptly, Gilda turns to look at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks. Her eyes are too bright. “I would have been okay with it. Why did you lie to me?”  
“I thought you would leave,” Harvey says quietly.   
“What?” Gilda laughs, ragged and wild. “Why the hell would you think that, Harvey? Do you really think so little of me?”  
“No,” Harvey says quickly. “No, it’s not that. Harv is—God, I don’t know. I’m not easy to deal with under the best of circumstances and I thought that if you knew how fucked I really was—”  
He falls silent. There’s no way he can end that sentence which won’t end up proving Gilda’s point.   
“It’s a mental illness, Harvey,” Gilda says. Her voice is almost gentle. “God knows I have a few of them myself. And it’s not your fault.”  
“It really sort of is, though,” Harvey says. He tries to smile. From the expression on Gilda’s face, it doesn’t come out the way he wants it to.  
“How is it your fault?” Bruce asks seriously.  
Harvey rubs the heel of his hand across his eyes, which are starting to ache. “Harv’s a bad person,” he says to the floor. “Really bad. You don’t know—the things he wants to do, the things he would do if he had control for any real time—he just wants to hurt people. He wants to hurt everyone. And he’s a part of me. So there’s a part of me that wants to hurt people. And no matter how you spin it that’s pretty bad.”  
“Yeah, except there’s a part of literally everyone that wants to hurt people,” Gilda says impatiently. “God, Harvey. You’re not special. You’re not uniquely and irredeemably evil. You’re just a fucking person.”  
Harvey shakes his head. “I don’t know how to explain this to you.”  
“You just did,” Gilda snaps. “You have an alternate personality and he’s terrible and you chose to hide him from me for the entirety of our marriage. It’s not a complicated story.”  
“Alter,” Bruce says quietly.   
Gilda glances at him. “What?”  
“Alters,” Bruce repeats. “They’re called alters.”   
Gilda stares at him for a moment. “Okay,” she says finally. “Alters.”  
“I thought it was best for both of us,” Harvey says miserably.   
“Yeah,” Gilda says. “I bet you really did, didn’t you?”  
She turns to look back out the window. Harvey closes his eyes.   
“Are there any others?” Bruce asks, after a long moment of painful quiet.   
Harvey opens his eyes again. “Besides Harv? I don’t think so. There may have been when I was a kid. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t remember from back then. But if there were, they aren’t active anymore. And none of them were ever as big as Harv.”  
“Big,” Bruce says curiously. “It’s very unusual for people with dissociative identity disorder too have only one alter. Perhaps your others have gone dormant somehow.”  
Harvey’s spine stiffens, electric. “Wow,” he says.   
“What?”  
Harvey shrugs uneasily. “Dissociative identity disorder. You just…said it.”   
Bruce’s eyebrows furrow. “That’s what this is, isn’t it?”  
“I guess it is,” Harvey replies. There’s no way to explain how many years he carefully did not even think those words, how he buried them in a place inside himself where they could not be spoken or heard.   
“There’s no point in not calling things what they are,” Bruce says, and Harvey knows that he really does mean that, and he’s not being cruel.   
“There are treatments,” Bruce continues after a pause, very carefully.   
“I can’t,” Harvey says instantly. This, at least, is something to which he’s devoted a fair amount of thought. “I’m DA. If this gets out, my career is over. I can’t risk that.”   
Bruce nods, his face remaining still. “It seems,” he says, “like this situation makes you pretty unhappy.”  
Harvey considers this for a moment. “Sometimes, I guess,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of practice dealing with it. Most of the time I do fine. And besides, Harv has been around so long. He’s sort of like my oldest friend. I don’t know who I’d be if he wasn’t there.”   
He’s being honest now, but that last bit of honesty hurts just a little too much. He laughs weakly, and Bruce looks at him, unsmiling, with those eyes that see far too clearly.   
“Have you ever done any of the things Harv tells you to?” he asks.   
“No,” Harvey says, because this he knows for sure. “Never.” It’s one of the bright solid things he clings to: he has never done the things Harv wants to do. At least not when he’s himself.   
Bruce nods, absorbing this information with the same calm, solemn, curiosity he’s displayed throughout this conversation. “You are really taking this extremely well,” Harvey says again.   
Bruce half-smiles. “I’m not exactly the spoiled rich kid everyone thinks I am.”  
“No, I know that, except—I mean, you actually are a spoiled rich kid. That’s not the extent of your character, but I would say that’s a pretty significant aspect of it.”  
The amusement on Bruce’s face ebbs. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that my life has been somewhat stranger than you know.”  
And then a look crosses his face that Harvey does not immediately understand, a strange sort of inward curl, like he’s examining himself and does not like what he sees.   
“You’ve been so brave,” he says.   
Harvey blinks. Brave is not a word he would use to describe his behavior. “What?”  
“You told us all of this. Your biggest secret. That’s an amazing thing.” Bruce does not actually seem very pleased as he says this: his mouth is twisting like a wound.   
“I guess,” Harvey says uneasily. “I should have done it earlier.” He shoots a quick glance at Gilda, who is looking at Bruce now with distinct confusion.   
“Still,” Bruce says, but it’s clear that his attention is not really in it. Something is happening in the dark spaces of his eyes, gears shifting, an alchemical change. And suddenly Harvey understands exactly what’s happening, and a brilliant strobe light of horrified amusement goes off in his head.   
“Before we go any further,” Bruce says, stiff and strange, like the words are burning his mouth, “there’s something I should tell you both. For honesty’s sake.”  
“Bruce,” Gilda says from the window. “We know you’re Batman. It’s okay.”  
It seems to take Bruce a moment to fully comprehend this. He sits on the floor, lips slightly parted, for a good two or three seconds. Harvey exhales. This is happening too now. Maybe that’s everything, out in the open? Probably not, but it sure seems like most of the major things.   
Bruce’s lips move silently, as if figuring out a math problem. Then he says “You do?”  
“It was Harvey who worked it out,” Gilda says, apologetically.   
“Sorry,” Harvey adds, still experiencing a bit of conversational whiplash.   
Bruce nods a couple of times, clearly reaching for some semblance of calm acceptance and completely failing. “How?”   
Harvey shifts in his seat. “I do spend time with both of you fairly frequently. You and Batman. Who is also you. It started out with some shared mannerisms. Like right now, you’re pulling your mouth in very thin, because you’re upset? Batman does that too. And your voices do still sort of sound the same. But I only noticed because I’ve known you forever.”  
“I see,” Bruce says, his mouth vanishing from his face.   
“After that I just started noticing coincidences,” Harvey says, unsure if he’s making things better or worse. “Batman was in a fight on the news, you broke your leg skiing somewhere in Europe. Stuff like that.”  
“I had no idea it was so obvious,” Bruce says rigidly.   
“It’s not,” Harvey replies hurriedly. “I just have a lot of unfair advantages in this department. No one who didn’t know you really, really, well would have guessed.”  
“And you told Gilda,” Bruce says meditatively.   
“Yeah,” Harvey says, feeling distinctly uncomfortable. “It seemed like the sort of thing that might become relevant.”  
Bruce makes eye contact, icy and unflinching. “You’re remarkably free with my secrets, especially given how careful you are with your own.”  
Gilda barks a sharp laugh. Harvey rolls his eyes. “Okay, I’m sorry. I fucked that up. I’ve fucked up really just a whole lot of things. Almost everything, really.”  
“Not everything,” Gilda says.   
Harvey stares at her, attempting to parse what that means. She turns away, looking at Bruce instead. “Are you angry?”  
“Not really,” Bruce says reflectively. “Mostly I’m just upset with myself. I should have been more careful. I assume you haven’t told anyone else?”  
“No,” Harvey says. “Of course not.”  
Bruce laughs, and Harvey detects a faint edge of deeply-buried hysteria in it. “Amazing,” he says. “You know, I think you may be the first people to figure it out on your own. Are there any burning questions you want to ask?”  
“No,” Harvey says. He’s already had plenty of opportunities to ask questions of both Batman and Bruce.   
Gilda scrutinizes Bruce for a wordless moment and then asks “Is it fun?”  
Bruce tilts his head to the side. “No,” he says. “Satisfying sometimes. Not fun.”  
Gilda nods. For a moment, there is quiet.   
“So when you brought up Batman at dinner, that was supposed to be funny?” Bruce asks.   
“Mostly,” Gilda admits. “That was why I brought it up.”  
“I thought of it as an opportunity for you to confess,” Harvey says. “But it was also pretty funny.”  
“You understand why I didn’t tell you,” Bruce says.  
“Not really, no,” Gilda replies.   
“Well—” Bruce flounders momentarily. “The more people know about it, the larger the possibility is of the knowledge getting out, and then we’re all in danger.”  
“We’ve known for almost a year,” Harvey points out.   
“Yes. Clearly my theory needs some work,” Bruce says. He looks down and runs his hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up in a thicket of points. “This has been a very weird day.”  
Harvey experiences a warm rush of sympathy. It was hard enough finding himself compelled to explain his own particular set of ugly secrets; discovering that Bruce and Gilda already knew everything about it would have been surreal to say the least. He squeezes Bruce’s hand. Bruce glances up at him, almost smiles, and squeezes back, more gently. There’s sweat collecting between their fingers, but as long as Bruce seems okay with it, Harvey is not planning on moving.   
Footsteps, and then the couch dips next to Harvey as Gilda sits down. “A weird day for everybody,” she says. Harvey, not daring to look at her head-on, glances at her out of the corner of his eye. She isn’t smiling, but her face has lost that terrible immovable quality. Her gaze flicks over to him and then away.   
Carefully, Bruce unfolds his free hand and places it lightly, palm-up, on Gilda’s knee. Gilda takes it, sliding her fingers between Bruce’s. It’s a slow, precise, operation. Harvey sees the gleam of her wedding ring pressed against Bruce’s palm, and experiences a breathtaking riptide of some feeling he can’t name, both sweet and agonizing. He wants, abruptly, to cry, but the moment passes.   
He lays his hand on the sofa next to Gilda, very cautiously, like an offering. Gilda looks at him for a long moment, her eyes opaque. Then she places her hand delicately on top of his. His heart leaps upwards like a hiccup trapped in his chest. Gradually, he curls his fingers around her hand, and she lets him.   
“I’m still mad at you,” she says.   
“That’s okay,” he replies breathlessly.   
Linked again, the circle of hands, and he feels that current moving in an endless ring through bone and blood, invisible light. Gilda’s pulse fluttering against the edge of one hand. Bruce’s against the other, slower, like the tick of a clock. And this is real. Somehow, this is real.   
“Is there something else we need to do? To…finalize this, or something?” Bruce says hesitantly.   
“I can’t think of anything,” Gilda says. “This does feel very informal.”  
“We can see if I remember enough contract law to pull up a legally binding document,” Harvey offers.   
Gilda laughs. “Legally binding to what? We, the undersigned, hereby confirm our intent to enter into a mutual…”  
She trails off. She still doesn’t want to say it. It’s hard to know what words would be appropriate, anyway.   
“It can’t be this easy, right?” Harvey says. “It just can’t be.”  
“It sort of seems like it might be,” Gilda says.   
“It’ll be easy if we let it be easy,” Bruce says.   
Harvey stares at him in blank surprise for a moment, and then says “Fuck me, that was profound. You should write fortune cookies.”  
Gilda snorts. Bruce smiles faintly.   
“It was just never going to be normal for us,” Harvey says, and he feels the truth of that statement like a bell ringing deep in him. “Not for any of us. It was always just going to be kind of weird and fucked. That was the only way for us.”  
“I don’t think it’s ever really been normal, honey,” Gilda says. “Maybe it just looked that way for a while.”  
“Yeah,” Harvey says. He leans back against the couch. “Maybe.”  
A moment passes. Gilda’s heartbeat settles. The living room feels smaller with the three of them in it. Harvey is aware of a stillness, a quiet, within him, which is somehow the complete opposite of the stillness and the quiet that lay inside him this morning.   
“Okay,” Gilda says, after the silence passes, like a cloud over the sun. “I’m really hungry.”  
“We can make dinner,” Bruce suggests.   
“An excellent idea,” Harvey declares. “I think we might even have pasta somewhere.”  
Bruce’s eyebrows lift. “Not soup? Will miracles never cease?”  
“Yeah, laugh it up. You get to chop the onions.”  
“We actually have sauce in a can, so no one has to chop anything,” Gilda corrects.   
“So much for revenge.” Harvey squeezes both of their hands, lets go, and stands.   
A hot billow of painful dizziness hits him. You fucking idiot, Harv growls, and the force of his hatred slams through Harvey from nowhere, like a wave of boiling lead. You stupid fucking piece of shit. I’ll kill him. I’ll kill them both.  
Gilda is laughing. Someone must have said something funny. Harvey manages to breathe and pulls his face into something like a smile, but Bruce is already looking at him, his eyes full of shadows. “You alright?”  
Harvey can hear the blood rushing in his head, like a choir of whispers. He exhales. Gilda is looking at him now too, her brow creased.   
“Yeah,” Harvey says. “Yeah. I think I’m okay.”  
Bruce puts an arm around his shoulders, with that same deliberate care with which he has initiated all physical contact. Harvey breathes in his warmth, his clean smell. Gilda puts her hand on the side of his face, lightly, like a benediction, and then lets it fall.   
Together, they go into the kitchen.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Never Quite Free" by the Mountain Goats. Written for a friend, with great love


End file.
